Khan will open the first Ponseti clinic in Pakistan.
By Allie Wright
allie-wright@uiowa.edu
Mansoor Khan spent two weeks in Iowa City this month, studying the Ponseti method for treating clubfoot in children.
And at the end of this month, Khan will use what he’s learned to open a clinic specializing in the Ponseti treatment. It will be the first in Pakistan to completely focus on the treatment.
Khan, an orthopedic surgeon from Pakistan, said many doctors in his home country are self taught in the procedure, so it is important to learn at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, where the treatment began.
“We all know how to put on casts, but this special technique, we need to do here,” he said. “There are a lot of fine points that you don’t pick up from reading a book.”
And the doctor has already improved in his technique, he said.
Ignacio Ponseti, who died in 2009, was the inventor of the non-surgical cure for clubfoot in small children. Instead of an invasive procedure, the patient’s foot was carefully stretched into the correct placement and then put in a cast.
“I’ve learned a lot of refinements to improve the way we were doing it,” Khan said. “I’ve been learning how to apply the cast properly and manage the patient.”
And this type of cure is important, said Khan, because it can help reverse a problem that can have lifetime effects.
“The foot is very supple and soft, so applying casts early on is easier,” he said. [Clubfoot patients] don’t get a job anywhere. Most end up being beggars.”
This outcome can be avoided if the problem is corrected quickly, he said.
And rather than sending Ponseti experts from Iowa City to other countries, it’s better to bring the doctors to this community, said Rachel Bender, a UI medical student and former co-president of the UI chapter.
“It’s better to have one leader from that community be trained really well and make them experts and make them good teachers, too, and send them home and have them be the main leaders in the area,” she said.
The chapter is hoping to keep up the efforts and bring a doctor from Africa to Iowa City in May.
Last year, UI medical students in the American Medical Student Association started raising money to pay for expenses to bring doctors from foreign countries to Iowa City.
It costs three thousand dollars for each doctor to come to Iowa City, said Bender, noting that the visiting doctors are not compensated for their time, other than paid expenses like room and board and transportation.
And the group is going to follow-up with Khan and his practice by sending over supplies, like training kits to educate others about the treatment.
Jose Morcuende, a UI associate professor in orthopedic surgery, helped Khan is his Ponseti treatment training.
Morcuende said Khan spent his time seeing patients and discussing the different issues each patient had with clubfoot.
“We had plenty of opportunities to talk in between clinics and in the evenings about the method and different aspects of clubfoot and how to address them,” he said.
Next year, Morcuende said, officials from the Ponseti International Association — Morcuende is the chief medical director — is planning to visit Khan and help train more doctors in the treatment.
And Morcuende touted Khan’s efforts in Pakistan and said he thinks his work will help curb the clubfoot problem in the less-fortunate country.
“I learned a lot from him about many aspects of Pakistan,” he said. “And also the optimism that things are going to get better and he is working hard in his area of influence to make it happen.”
