By: Daniel Karlmax
Over seventy percent of patients examined during the free medical outreach at Gidan Waya community, have been discovered to be hypertensive, which is a serious health condition that could be fatal, if not checked.
Results from the clinical eye examination during the outreach showed that over 70% of patients, ages 50 and above were discovered to have cataract. Dr. Paul Odumu, the Chairman/CEO and Team Lead for the partnering organizations, Odumehaje Christian Medical Mission, OCMM, and Helping International, HTI, made the disclosure at the week-long Free Medical Outreach which took place from the 5th- 11th June, 2023 in Gidan Waya, Kaduna State, Nigeria.
He said, the outreach organized by Mission Aid International in partnership with OCMM, HTI and Raymond Akor Memorial Foundation, RAMF, was aimed at bringing the love of Christ to the people by ministering to their bodies, souls and spirits so they can be completely liberated and have better lives.
The medical phylanthropist said that the most prevalent health conditions discovered in the area include hypertension, cataract (sight occlusion) and diabetes among others.
Dr. Odumu explained that, high blood pressure could lead to heart attack, coronary disease, stroke which is cardiovascular accident, myocardial infarction and kidney diseases amongst others, and emphasized the need to dig into the nutritional history of the people to arrive at its cause.
He pointed that, in recent past, southern part of Kaduna state had been bedeviled with activities of unknown gun men which he said had affected their health and the entire socio-economic wellbeing of the area, hence the need to bring to them spiritual, medical and economic help to enhance their standards of living .
“When the heart is traumatized, there’s emotional sickness and one needs Devine healing, a word from God to bring succor and hope at such times. That’s why we are here.
“I’ve consulted about twenty to thirty patients this morning and I was shocked to find out that about 95% of them have hypertension, and painfully they were unaware of it. I mean we have blood pressures as high as two hundred over one hundred (200/100) and the persons don’t know they are hypertensive at all, that’s very dangerous.
“Hypertension, to a large extent can be hereditary, and can follow recurrent pregnancies, a lot of salt intake, smoking and alcoholism. For the sake of community medicine, there’ll be need to dig into this and find the underlining causes and deal with them wholesomely.
Dr. Paul also identified some prevalent cases that needed surgical interventions which include: hydroceles, hernias and acute appendicitis, which were handled surgically at the Gidan Waya center.
“OCMM and HTI brought in surgical consumables and equipments that have added impetus to the outreach. In an agrarian community such as this, they cannot escape hernias because with farming activities, there’s increased intra-abdominal pressure that can result to it.
“So, we’ve seen a lot of hernias, hydroceles (fluid around the testicles causing swelling to the scrotum) in both adults and children. We’ve seen a number of acute appendicitis, lipomas ( fatty swellings in parts of the body) among others”, explained Dr. Odumu.
On her part, one of the outreach team members and senior nurse with the Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital, Kaduna, Mrs. Esther Ajeh, decried the increasing cases of hernias in children within the community, noting that it could be as a result of some malfunction and defects during conception and development that would need thorough research to unveil the causes.
“The prevalent case we’ve seen here is hernia which is also so common in their children, which is actually a thing of concern to us because we are expecting such cases in adults rather than children”,
She explained that a major case for surgery – a reoccurrent hernia, was brought to them from Kaduna town where the patient had two previous surgeries done and it kept breaking down. On the theater table, it was discovered that the patient also had bilateral hydrocele, after repairing the hernia, hydrocelectomy was also done to fix the hydroceles.
There are other surgical cases to be handled by tomorrow. Two children have already been booked down for same herniorrhophies, and a lady for ovarian cyst.
According to Dr. David Chindo, nine free surgeries were handled by the close of day 2 of the medical outreach program without any challenge as at the time of filing this report.
Read More at: Ace News Reporters
