Dr. Rawad Obeid had a plan.
In 2009, three years after he earned his medical degree at the University of Damascus, Obeid flew 6,000 miles from his native Syria to the United States, where he’d study pediatric medicine and eventually open his own practice. He’d forge a prosperous career and live in comfort, he figured.
Obeid’s vision evolved when he started working as a resident at Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. Many of the parents of the young patients he treated for injuries from falls, asthma and respiratory infections had low incomes — they were jobless or underemployed and often had no insurance. “We took care of everybody, regardless of their circumstances,” Obeid says. “We signed them up for Medicare or Medicaid if they had nothing. It made me think differently. I started thinking more about serving others than serving myself.”
The young doctor changed his career path. Today, he’s a research fellow in the neonatology department at Children’s National Medical Center in the District of Columbia. Obeid treats babies born with a lack of oxygen, which puts them at risk of developmental problems. He also works with premature infants who suffer from intraventricular hemorrhage — bleeding in the brain, which can damage nerve cells and lead to impairment in walking, a condition known as cerebral palsy. In his free time, Obeid is studying Spanish so he’ll be better able to communicate with the many Spanish-speaking immigrant parents of his patients.
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
Rather than launching a private practice, Obeid, who became a permanent legal U.S. resident about a year ago, has accepted a job at the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware. Starting in July, he’ll treat kids at risk of developing and who already have cerebral palsy.
Obeid is one of the more than 278,000 doctors with international medical degrees in the U.S., according to the American Medical Association. This includes researchers, teachers, administrators, inactive physicians and doctors who provide medical care in the U.S., and it represents 27 percent of all doctors in the country.
Flow of Doctors Imperiled
The continued flow of some doctors from overseas into the U.S. is jeopardized by President Donald Trump’s executive order to temporarily ban travel from six countries: Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Iran and Yemen. Immigration from these countries poses a security risk, the Trump administration says. Some states and civil rights attorneys are opposing the order in court. In mid-March, a federal judge in Hawaii and another in Maryland issued orders temporarily barring the order from taking effect. The administration could appeal.
If upheld, the travel ban could have a dramatic impact on health care in the U.S.: Annually, 14 million doctor’s appointments are provided nationally by physicians from the six banned countries, according to the Immigrant Doctors Project, a collaboration between 10 economists trained at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wanted to answer the question of how the travel ban could affect the delivery of health services in the U.S. Doctors from the six countries provide 2.3 million appointments a year in areas with doctor shortages, according to the project. For example, in Toledo, Ohio, an area with a doctor shortage, between 30 and 50 physicians from banned countries provide an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 appointments a year.
Shutting down travel from the six countries “would have a huge impact” on health care in the U.S., says Dr. Rick Wilkerson, a West Point graduate who retired as an Army doctor in 1989 and has a private orthopedic practice in Iowa. “There are a number of excellent physicians from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and other countries who are providing excellent medical care in the United States,” he says. Once he retired from the Army, Wilkerson remained dedicated to international medical efforts. In 1991, he went to Peshawar, Pakistan, to treat Afghan refugees. In 2004, at the request of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, Wilkerson worked with the U.S. government to conduct an international medical conference in Baghdad. That led to Wilkerson teaming up with six other U.S. doctors who formed a group that returned to Iraq often to treat patients and share their medical knowledge with Iraqi physicians.
[See: 10 Questions Doctors Wish Their Patients Would Ask.]
As part of that group or individually, Wilkerson has been to Iraq 11 times since 2004, performing countless knee replacements and ankle arthroscopies. Since 2009, he’s annually hosted a doctor from overseas, typically someone with a tie to the University of Basrah, to share his knowledge of orthopedic medicine. In 2011, Wilkerson and his wife launched Love Takes Root, a nonprofit whose mission is to help needy children worldwide by helping provide shelter, education and health services. The organization’s first project is an orphanage in Haiti, a country Wilkerson has visited 25 times since 2010 on medical missions.
One of the key ways that immigration boosts health care services and knowledge in the U.S. and other countries is by spurring innovation, says Dr. Ali Azizzadeh, professor and chief of vascular and endovascular surgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston. “Putting an end to immigration would put an end to innovation,” he says.
Immigration Fosters Innovation
Azizzadeh cites his own career to bolster his assertion. Born in Iran, he immigrated with his family to the U.S. at age 13 and studied at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The renowned heart surgeon Michael DeBakey — widely considered one of the greatest surgeons of all time — became chairman of surgery at the school in 1948 and transformed it into a respected academic institution. DeBakey, who died in 2008 at age 99, was the son of Lebanese-Christian parents who immigrated to the U.S. to escape religious bias. Immigration also boosted Azizzadeh’s skills by allowing him to work directly with a renowned surgeon. During a vascular surgery fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Azizzadeh also worked with Dr. Juan Parodi, an Argentinian physician who in the early 1990s pioneered an innovative, minimally invasive technique to treat abdominal aortic aneurysms.
The technique saves lives. “If the abdominal aorta ruptures, most people die before they get to the hospital,” he says. Parodi’s innovation “caused a revolution in the field of vascular surgery.” After working with Parodi and learning the technique, Azizzadeh in turn has for the past dozen years or so taught that method to other doctors. “I’m training the next generation of vascular surgeons,” he says.
[See: 10 Ways to Prepare for Surgery.]
Because he is a naturalized U.S. citizen, a travel ban wouldn’t affect him personally, but it could adversely affect clinical care, research and educational training programs in the U.S., Azizzadeh says. “Immigration increases the talent pool and brings in new ideas and people pursuing dreams of doing procedures more efficiently and less invasively,” he says. “If some doctors don’t apply for our residency programs because they have a hard time getting a visa, it can have a negative impact on our ability to care for our patients.”
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Doctors Saving Lives Across Borders: How Immigration Spurs Medical Innovation originally appeared on usnews.com
