Oregon doctor returns home after many successful cataract surgeries

Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — LBJ Hospital CEO Dr. Akapusi Ledua, welcomed last week on the behalf of the LBJ board of Directors, Dr David Poulsen from the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland Oregon.

Dr Poulsen is part of a group that has developed a partnership with LBJ.

Earlier this year the group came down, and donated laser equipment to the hospital, and started training local eye doctors on the use of this equipment and also provided surgery themselves to care for our patients.

Dr Poulsen returned home earlier this week after several successful surgeries using the donated equipment.

Dr. Ledua thanked him for his time and commitment to the partnership and the program.

“We have developed and we are very blessed to have such partners who are willing to come down and provide this assistance to our community, not only to do the surgeries but most importantly to train our local doctors on the use of the latest technology to do surgeries, for the purpose of long-term sustainability  in our community.

“These doctors plan to come every 3 months hopefully at least a week, maybe longer, depending on how things work out but they would like to be able to do a lot of cataract surgery as well as train the local ophthalmologists here...”

That is a type of cataract surgery that uses ultrasound energy to break up the cataract and put a new lens in through a much smaller opening in the eye, and so for certain patients it works very well, according to Dr Poulsen.

The three Ophthalmologists, according to Dr Poulsen, are really great and he thinks LBJ is lucky to have them here and do cataract surgery as well.

“This is just a different technique that they are trying to bring, which is something that's common in the States, in Oregon, and they want local patients to benefit from it.

“The first couple years they want to develop it into a training program where these skills are passed on, perhaps the visiting medical students as well who may be interested in ophthalmology who we can also recruit to the specialty on the island would be fantastic.”  

Dr. Dave Sunia says the program has been here for a while, with visiting doctors coming for several years. In 1985 Dr. Ben was one of them — he left for a while and came back in 1990, then left again and he is still involved with sustaining this program.

The program was suspended during the Coronavirus pandemic, and when they returned this year in June, they brought with them a gift. That’s the Laser machine for LBJ hospital.

Dr Poulsen’s visit this time is a sign of continuous blessings of having people that are willing to help American Samoa’s hospital, says Dr Sunia.

When asked about how serious the cataract problem is here in American Samoa, Dr Poulsen said cataracts in general are the number one cause of preventable blindness in the world and that is so pretty much everywhere you go.

“There's a problem with cataracts even in the town that I'm normally at in Oregon, which is a small town. We have a limited number of ophthalmologists since there’s always a backlog of people waiting to get cataract surgery. And here in American Samoa, there's quite a few patients who need cataract surgery that they just can't get it yet because there's just not enough eye doctors.

“The main cause of cataracts is just age. But you can tend to have cataracts a little earlier in patients who have diabetes, which a number of the patients that I've done surgery on have diabetes as well, so that can have your cataract get a little worse earlier on in life — especially through diabetes that has been not controlled well. But I think mainly it's just age-related.

 “So the way we do cataract surgeries, we just make a little small incision in the eye. Very small. Only like 2 and a 1/2 millimeters so very small. And then we use a machine that uses ultrasound energy to break up the cataract into smaller pieces and then remove it from the eye. And then we put a lens in. Basically what that is when you have cataracts is actually our normal lens in our eye gets cloudy— we call it a cataract but it's actually an important part of our eye.”

The equipment that had been donated to LBJ in June 2023, was a type that's very portable and it's been used at other places as part of global outreach ophthalmology programs with a lot of success and it's very durable, doesn't have a lot of the problems some of the more complicated machines have, he said.