What if you could help half of all impoverished blind people see once again by figuring out how to make a procedure cost go from $200 to just $3? With at least 51% of the world’s blindness caused by cataracts 1, this thought leader’s innovation has already changed millions of lives and the power to change millions more.
Growing up in a small village in northern Nepal, Dr. Sanduk Ruit lost his brothers and sisters to diseases that could have been cured by modern medicine. So now, he has dedicated his life to being a doctor to the poor, serving almost 1 million people, and personally performing over 130,000 surgeries to restore people’s vision in some of Nepals most rural villages!
This story of an amazing modern thought leader shows just how far we will go to take care of one another. You don’t want to miss this touching tale!
When the dust clears.
First thing first, what’s a cataract? I wasn’t totally sure, so I looked it up.
A cataract is when the lens, the part of our eye that focuses light, becomes clouded. Due to medical conditions or more often occurring naturally as we age, our lenses become “less flexible, less transparent and thicker”, according to the Mayo Clinic. “As the cataract continues to develop, the clouding becomes denser and involves a bigger part of the lens. A cataract scatters and blocks the light as it passes through the lens, preventing a sharply defined image from reaching your retina. As a result, your vision becomes blurred.” 2
Thankfully, there’s a generally safe and easy procedure to correct cataracts and restore vision!
With artificial lenses, restoring people’s vision and livelihood is really just a matter of switching out the old for the new.
Unfortunately, it’s often a costly procedure, with each artificial lens racking up a bill of over $200! So, for those living in the most rural parts of Nepal, this solution is out of reach. Well, that was until Dr. Sanduk Ruit’s team figured out how to bring the cost of those pricey lenses down to just $3.
Here’s Great Big Story with the inspiring results of this innovation!
Wasn’t that an amazing story? You can discover so many more in our curated library of Great Big Story videos, or by diving into their YouTube channel!
You can learn more about Dr. Ruit’s life-changing program by visiting Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology’s website!
It’s always amazing to see what people do when we put our minds to something!
At the base of his work, Dr. Ruit wants to see healthcare reach those living in the poorest communities in the world, so he is innovating ways to make it so! It reminds me of the way the nonprofit Charity: Water has been able to bring clean water to over 10 million people. Their founder, a former nightclub promoter, wanted to see water be easily accessible all over the globe, so they came up with a plan to make it a reality.
What would you like to see more of? More healthcare? How about more accessible food? Music? Dance? Bees?
Every day we see people solving some of the biggest problems in their communities and around the globe by putting their focus on what they want to see more of. This thought process sparks innovation and opens roads to go down that have previously been looked over. Just click those links I put in the paragraph above to see the ways everyday people in 6 different communities around the world are bringing more of what they want to see to their communities.
Here’s another one of my favorites:
Why is This Busker Giving All of His Money Away?
Can a street performer change the way we think about helping our neighbor? Well, in the subways of New York City, one musician’s experiment in kindness has spread to a global movement to do good with whatever talents we have!
Read Article Watch Video Listen to PodcastWho knows what you’ll come up with!
As always, stay open to new possibilities.
- Sam
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” —Albert Einstein
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Notes:
- “Priority Eye Diseases.” World Health Organization, 18 Apr. 2018, www.who.int/blindness/causes/priority/en/index1.html, /entity/blindness/causes/priority/en/index.html. Accessed 7 May 2020. ↩
- “Cataracts – Symptoms and Causes.” Mayo Clinic, , 2018, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/cataracts/symptoms-causes/syc-20353790. Accessed 7 May 2020. ↩
- Great Big Story. “This Surgeon Has Restored Sight to 130,000 Blind People.” YouTube, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVCfYGJV_2s. Accessed 7 May 2020. ↩
