Giving Back and Changing Lives
Napa Pain Institute’s Dr. Ramesh Singa, along with his fiancé, Dr. Lisa Chargualaf spent a week in Iloilo City in the Philippines last month to take part in a medical mission trip through Marian Rose World Mission. Marian Rose World Mission is a nonprofit organization focused on helping make the world a better, happier place – a world where people of all ages, live in peace and are treated with respect and dignity free from poverty, disease, fear and illiteracy. In partnership with sister charity LIG Global Foundation, they have conducted various charitable services in Iloilo City, Philippines and more than 150 people volunteer for them each year and make the difference in the lives of many people. MRWM upholds the sanctity of life from conception to death. With this guiding principle, MRWM aims to provide quality health care to all peoples all over the world that need it.
On this, his third mission trip to Iloilo City, Dr. Singa was part of the Pain Team and lectured and demonstrated chronic pain procedures and regional anesthesia blocks, to medical students, residents, and anesthesiologists. The aim was to educate them about how chronic pain can be managed with pain procedures as well as how to control patients’ pain before and after surgery using nerve blocks. With the knowledge and ability to offer the regional anesthesia block procedure, local providers will be able to bring relief to patients who would otherwise suffer because they are unable to pay for anesthesia or pain medications.
Dr. Chargualaf was part of the team of anesthesiologists who, along with volunteer surgeons provided surgeries free of charge to impoverished patients who suffer with chronic pain but have no resources to seek treatment. Dr. Singa, Dr. Chargualaf, and the other medical staff worked tirelessly, in operating rooms with two patients to a room, performing about 70 surgeries in five days.
The Department of Anesthesiology has now established a room in a hospital there where the staff will see chronic pain patients two days out of the week. This is a huge step forward in getting chronic pain sufferers the help that they need because often cultural values dictate that no one should talk about pain or the impact it has in their life.