AMA's Davis Award winner "Dr. Shankar Man Rai, M.D. Surgeon ": Shankar Man Rai, M.D., 48, is director of the surgical outreach center in Nepal for Interplast, a Mountain View, Calif.-based humanitarian organization that provides free reconstructive surgery to people in developing countries around the world. Rai, who has worked in association with Interplast since 1992, has helped gain treatment for more than 5,000 patients since then, many of them children with cleft lips or palates or burns. Rai is the son of a career Nepalese army soldier and brother to four Gurkha Brigade soldiers who paid his way through school. Rai was the first in his family to receive an education, he said. As a boy, Rai hiked two hours every day at 6,000-foot elevations from his remote village to the nearest school. Today, it still requires a three-day walk from his village to reach the nearest road, Rai said, and another 18-hour bus ride to make Katmandu. But in the late 1970s, when Rai left home to go to college and then medical school in the Nepalese capital, he walked the entire way. It took 14 days, he said. "We work in many developing countries on three continents, and the story is typically the physicians there are from wealthy families," said Bill Schneider, M.D., a plastic surgeon and chief medical officer of Interplast. Schneider said he believes Rai's rural origins are the source of his dedication to the poor. "He is a very modest man, but he has done incredible things in Nepal," Schneider said. "It's almost astonishing what he's done." Due to political instability from a Maoist insurrection that has prompted a U.S. State Department advisory against travel to Nepal, Interplast has not sent U.S. surgical teams into the country for two years, according to Schneider. "But that's the beauty of the program," Schneider said. "He's doing surgery every day on the poor so we don't need to be there." Rai said he spends two or three days a week visiting rural hospitals, performing surgeries and rounding up patients at clinics outside of Katmandu in 52 of the 75 Nepalese districts that remain open to travel. As part of the outreach program, Interplast also helps pay for the parents of postoperative children to come and stay at the district centers for extended speech therapy. Read more.... source: www.interplast.org or www.interplast.org/files/ News%20-%20Modern%20Physi cian%20Story%20on%20Dr.%2 0Rai%20-%202.pdf or http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3353.html