World-Renowned Spine Doctor Rick Hodes Will Speak In Woods Hole
Marine Biological Laboratory will host Dr. Rick Hodes, medical director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Spine and Heart Project in Ethiopia, to speak at the Falmouth Forum on May 6.
The Falmouth Forum has a decades-long history at MBL, said Dr. Michael Fishbein, a member of MBL’s committee in charge of inviting speakers and presenters. The Falmouth Forum typically hosts one speaker each month from the fall to the start of the summer season in May.
“The idea was that it was a form of community outreach for the MBL to more or less give back to the community and share with the community some of the speakers that the MBL had access to,” Dr. Fishbein said.
Dr. Hodes, a Long Island native, has familial roots on Cape Cod but has never visited Falmouth before. The subject of two movies —“Zemene” and “Making the Crooked Straight”—and a book titled “This Is A Soul: The Mission Of Rick Hodes,” Dr. Hodes’ story had been told before. But at the Falmouth Forum, attendees will have the chance to hear him recount his own life and tell some of his most personal and meaningful stories, many of which have to do with his treatment of more than 1,000 for spinal deformities in Africa.
Dr. Hodes’ story is not a typical one. After graduating from Vermont’s Middlebury College with a degree in geography, the man who would later be named a 2007 CNN hero did not know yet what he wanted to do with his life.
“I hitchhiked to Alaska and lived in Alaska for several years,” Dr. Hodes said during a phone interview with the Enterprise. “Then [I] decided that the best thing I could do was go to medical school.”
After pre-med at the University of Alaska and medical school at the University of Rochester, Dr. Hodes trained in internal medicine in the Johns Hopkins system.
“But I somehow knew that I wanted to do global health,” he said. “This was the ‘80s. Nobody was doing global health. You might go abroad for three months or something, but nobody was doing that for their life.”
As a medical student, Dr. Hodes spent a summer in Bangladesh, a winter in southern India, and time in Ethiopia during the famine in the mid-1980s. Then, he received a Fulbright Fellowship and was sent back to Ethiopia to teach at a medical school there.
“I was the first Fulbrighter to go [to Ethiopia] after the communist government took over,” he said. “The US government was trying to open up a cultural exchange, and I was the first person. I went for a year but that ended up being two and a half years.”
His journey later took him to the World Health Organization, and after that, he was back in Ethiopia to work as a doctor to Ethiopian Jews immigrating to Israel with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC. Israel and Ethiopia had finally reestablished diplomatic relations following the war of the 1970s, and Ethiopian Jews were swarming the capital of Addis Ababa. By the summer of 1990, Dr. Hodes said, there were 25,000 Ethiopian Jews in the city.
“The JDC opened up a medical program for [the Ethiopian Jews], and I wrote [the JDC] a letter and said, ‘I’m an American doctor and happen to be Jewish as well. I just spent two and a half years in Ethiopia teaching at the medical school, and I know most of the doctors in the country. Can I help you?’ And they hired me to be the doctor for Ethiopian immigrants to Israel.”
Dr. Hodes served as the main doctor to Ethiopian Jew immigrants for the greater part of three decades. He also assisted in Operation Solomon, a military operation that airlifted 14,400 Ethiopian immigrants to Israel in 24 hours.
“My role was getting people out of the hospital,” he said. “Even miracles occurred that day as well.”
Miracles play a big part in Dr. Hodes’ life. A religious man, Dr. Hodes practices Judaism but has worked closely with people of various religions, which actually factors into a lot of his work.
“I just get these sort of crazy cases and I’m somehow able to help them,” he said. “The other thing that happens in my life sort of all the time is I’ll get this unbelievable challenge that I think is impossible, and then like some door will open, and the problem will be solved.”
While Dr. Hodes was the clinic director for JDC, he spent his spare time volunteering after hours at Mother Teresa’s mission in Ethiopia. That, he said, is where his life changed forever in 1999.
“I was volunteering at Mother Teresa’s mission and I met two abandoned orphans who had tuberculosis of the spine. One of them had a 90-degree angle in their back, one of them had a 120-degree angle in their back.”
Dr. Hodes tried his best to get them the surgery that they needed to keep them from becoming paralyzed, but could not find anyone willing to do it. Then, he said, he found an answer.
“So I get this brilliant idea that I could adopt them, add them to my American health insurance and get them surgery in the United States,” he said. “The problem is when you adopt an abandoned orphan who doesn’t have any relatives, they become yours for life. So, on one hand, I can save their life; on the other hand, we’d have to spend the rest of our lives together. So I asked God what I should do, and he actually answered me. And he said, ‘I’m offering you a chance to help these boys. Don’t say no.’”
So, Dr. Hodes did just that: he adopted the two boys, brought them to Dallas, Texas, got them the surgery they needed, and moved back to Ethiopia with them. When another young patient with a bad back came along, he repeated the process.
“Serial adoption is probably not the answer to spinal deformity,” Dr. Hodes said. “I make it sound like I went down to the 7-Eleven and picked up three quarts of milk. Every step is a really difficult thing.”
But, as things tend to go in Dr. Hodes’ life, he just so happened to meet Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei, a Ghanaian orthopedic surgeon specializing in spinal reconstruction, and one of the best in the world.
“So through the JDC, we opened up the spine program at Mother Teresa’s mission, where I met those two boys, in 2006,” Dr. Hodes said. “That year, we got 20 new spine patients and did 11 surgeries in Ghana. Now, the word is out because we’ve done over 1,000 surgeries. Literally [a few] weekends ago, I was in a town called Bahir Dar in northwest Ethiopia, and we were screening patients with spinal deformities and we got 165 [new patients] in a weekend. So I have the largest collection of the worst spinal deformities perhaps in the world, and that has taken over my life.”
Dr. Hodes has been widely recognized for his work, having recently been highlighted in a TikTok video by Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ). Sen. Booker shared a story that Dr. Hodes shared with him when the two were seated next to each other at a Passover Seder, which may sound familiar. Dr. Hodes met a girl with a tumor who badly needed surgery to save her life, but could find no one to do it.
Sen. Booker recounts how Dr. Hodes accidentally overslept one morning, which meant there was no time for his morning prayer. He ended up going to the synagogue after his morning meetings.
“He happens to be praying next to a man [and] asks who he is,” Sen. Booker says in the video. “He says, ‘I’m a doctor,’ and [Dr. Hodes] goes, ‘What kind of doctor?’ And the man says he is a doctor who has this particular specialty, which turns out to be the exact kind of doctor that this woman with a tumor needs. And the man, Dr. Nussbaum, offers to do the surgery for free. Think about this: a Muslim girl who goes to a Catholic orphanage is helped by these two Jewish doctors. This is the glory that we see in the world often amidst all the challenges.”
There are many more stories like this in his life, Dr. Hodes said.
“I want people to know who I am.”
Dr. Hodes will be speaking at the Falmouth Forum on Friday, May 6, at 7:30 PM in the Cornelia Clapp Auditorium in Woods Hole. The event is open to the public and free to attend, either in person or via Zoom. To register for virtual attendance, visit the MBL website under “Events.” To learn more about Dr. Rick Hodes, head to www.rickhodes.org.