Dr. Wayne F. Larrabee, Jr. – Artist And Humanitarian

In international work, the surgical programs have been the poor stepchild of public health in terms of money and hours invested, said Dr. Larrabee. Facial deformities are now gaining more attention because the importance of patients’ quality of life issues is being recognized. As the Smile China project describes it, After years of shame and isolation, these children are transformed-like a beautiful butterfly coming out of its cocoon-into outgoing, ambitious, and confident individuals.

If kids with cleft palates go unrepaired, they can’t get a job, can’t go to school, can’t get married, Dr. Larrabee said. We’re collecting the data on what results in these children’s lives from performing a certain intervention; that is, how many years of life or good quality of life will each child get?

The group hopes that by providing evidence of the huge difference these interventions make, it will be easier to raise funds worldwide.

Upcoming travel for Dr. Larrabee will include a Smile China-sponsored trip to China in September 2009. Also, he and another surgeon will make a return trip to Kazakhstan in an effort to expand missions to central Asia and elsewhere.

K. A. Kelly McQueen, MD, MPH, an anesthesiologist and public health consultant in Phoenix with a special interest in the provision of surgical care following disasters and in humanitarian crises, knows Dr. Larrabee from their work with the Global Burden of Surgical Disease working group (www.gsd2008.org ). The group first met in 2008 with support from the University of Washington and Operation Smile, a project similar to Smile China.

The scientific work and writing Dr. Larrabee does is very important, said Dr. McQueen. He works diligently advocating for the cost effectiveness of surgical intervention and the important role of surgery within global health.

Family

Dr. Larrabee and his wife, Tane, who is originally from Hawaii, have eight children between them, including a son from Tane’s previous marriage (Spencer, age 21), their son Gregory (age 8), and three Latin American children (Shane, age 33, adopted from Costa Rica; Kai, age 27, from Colombia, and Sascha, age 31, who is Mexican-American). The couple just adopted from Kazakhstan three children, two sisters and a brother (ages 4, 3, and 1), who currently speak only Russian. Although the Larrabees intended to adopt just one child-and in fact, one from China-the process there was long and drawn-out. Instead, they switched gears and pursued connections in Kazakhstan. Because the adoption agency does not split up sibling groups, they took all three.