healing in the broadest sense

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Healing – in the Broadest Sense

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Rambam Couple Educates Doctors and Cures Patients Worldwide

Married to each other for 34 years, Rambam Doctors Margalit and Avraham Lorber have also coupled medicine with altruism throughout their professional lives. She, a rheumatologist and immunologist, and he, a pediatric cardiologist, the Lorbers hold senior positions at Rambam, respectively as a director of Autoimmune Diseases Unit and Head of Pediatric Cardiology. When not working in these capacities, the doctors frequently treat patients in developing countries, where their specialties are poorly served, if they exist at all.

The Lorbers at Vietnam

In September, 2009, the Lorbers travelled to Vietnam, where they both left marks in their own areas. A Vietnamese colleague living in Germany, Dr Trong Phi-Le, invited Avraham to come to the southeast Asian country to teach local doctors to do therapeutic catheterizations for children with congenital heart disease. Without this intervention, these children would have no chance. Avraham accepted this voluntary assignment, and took it a step further by convincing medical technology manufacturers to donate the necessary equipment. He arrived at Danang Hospital to begin the two-week course with a huge crate of medical devices in tow.

Dr Lorber specializes in the rapidly evolving field of interventional Cardiology that corrects heart defects without open heart surgery. “With various catheterization techniques, which were once used exclusively for diagnosis, we can now treat patients in a relatively non-invasive – and highly effective – manner,” said Dr Lorber. “For example,” he continued, ”coil stents and sealing devices can be used to dilate stenotic valves using a balloon catheter or to seal leaks or congenital heart septum defects. Employing these methods, Rambam pediatric cardiologists have been treating various heart defects for more than a decade.”

These techniques will now be applied regularly in Danang Hospital. There, “graduates” of the workshop will perform procedures taught by Avraham, with equipment he recruited, in a new Catheterization Room, built through donations raised by Dr Trong Phi-Le. This will translate directly to improved quality of life – if not life itself – for youngsters with heart disease from throughout Vietnam.

This is hardly Dr Lorber’s first foray into volunteer activities abroad. He has taught similar courses to doctors in numerous countries of the former Soviet Union, Kazachstan, Azerbijan and in Romania. Dr Lorber's activity in Romania is a partnership with the European Society of Cardiology.
Likewise, Dr Margalit Lorber is a long-time altruist/activist. Accompanying her husband to Vietnam, Margalit led a course there on HIV medicine for Vietnamese doctors. Pointing out that there are no infectious disease or immunology specialists in Vietnam, Margalit, working with a translator, taught the doctors what she termed “the ABCs of HIV and specifically prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV.”

Margalit Lorber has been working in the field of HIV Medicine since 1993. At that time the disease had a high mortality rate and no effective treatment existed. Often, the best doctors could do was ‘hold the hands’ of their patients. In 1996, the breakthrough HAART "cocktail" changed the status of AIDS from being a fatal to a ‘chronic manageable’ illness. With this therapy, the expected lifespan and quality of life for HIV-infected patients became almost the same as that for non-infected individuals.

Israel has high standards for HIV care, and low number of HIV positive patients. This is due to a number of factors, but certainly in part to educational efforts of many doctors like Margalit Lorber. “We devote much time educational efforts,” says Margalit. “For example, we sit for hours with patients, using specially-designed tools and printed materials to illustrate treatment options, and explain about dosages and side effects. Above all, patients must believe in us.”

Dr Lorber also participates in MASHAV programs, the Ministry of Health programs, and in the non-profit organization, Ba’Shaar which sponsors informative and preventive activities regarding HIV. Through B’Shaar, Dr Lorber and other academics voluntarily lecture on HIV in middle and high schools throughout Israel.

Like her husband, Margalit is often involved in healing and educational programs outside of Israel’s borders. In Ethiopia, through a USA-funded effort, she sought to upgrade the level of local doctors by teaching and accompanying them in their clinics. Currently, she is involved with a Foreign Ministry course for heads of the health establishment in the republic of Georgia. In 2009 she was Israel’s representative to a conference on HIV and Women and gave a talk at the UN in NY, which probed how developed nations can help the third world in combating HIV.

Despite their full-time schedules as clinicians at Rambam, the Lorbers continue to seek ‘extracurricular’ activities. “We believe it’s not enough to stay in the office and write prescriptions,” says Margalit. “Our mission as doctors is much broader – that’s why we try to address the most pressing issues at home, and to help out in other places where we are most needed.”