Though conditions such as hernias or bone fractures may not capture the imagination quite the way deadly outbreaks do, more people die each year from lack of surgical intervention than from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Yet only 6.3 percent of the 312.9 million annual surgical procedures go to the poorest third of the global population. One obstacle may be lack of funds—it would take an estimated $350 billion to train personnel and build up the necessary capacity to bring fast care to even 80 percent of those who need it. But that’s a steal: Lost economic output due to surgically treatable conditions will cost $12.3 trillion by 2030. An even bigger problem has been lack of sustained international interest.
Fortunately, surgery is starting to emerge from the periphery of global health, as a number of specialized organizations are bringing doctors and surgical infrastructure to the developing world. Find out which standard procedures have big impact below.
Eyes
Cataract
Condition: A clouding of the lens that impedes vision.
Fact: Cataracts are the world’s leading cause of visual impairment and the leading cause of blindness in the developing world.
Organization: Since 1990, the Lions Clubs International Foundation’s SightFirst program has provided support for more than 7.84 million sight-restoring cataract surgeries around the world.
Teeth
Periodontal disease
Condition: Infection of the gums and other structures around the teeth, which can lead to severe pain and tooth loss and often requires surgical intervention.
Fact: Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease in the world, and dental conditions account for $144 billion in lost global productivity every year.
Organization: Prevention is especially important when it comes to teeth. Health Volunteers Overseas increases capacity by training surgeons and dentists in Africa, where the dentist-to-population ratio is currently 1-to-150,000 (compared to 1-to-2,000 in most industrialized countries).
Heart
Congenital heart defect
Condition: A general term for abnormalities such as a hole in the heart, leaky valves, or defective vessels.
Fact: This is the most common birth defect, affecting 1 in 100 children.
Organization: Heart Care International uses a two-pronged approach, building long-term surgical capacity by sending medical volunteers to train staff and nurses around the world, while offering treatments in the most urgent cases.
Pelvis
Obstetric fistula
Condition: Obstructed labor presses an unborn child tightly against the mother’s pelvis, leading to lack of blood flow that can cause tissue to become necrotic, resulting in incontinence.
Fact: The World Health Organization estimates there are more than 2 million women living with obstetric fistula, with 50,000 to 100,000 new cases each year. The condition frequently results in spousal abandonment and subsequent financial disaster
Organization: Fifty percent of the world’s population live within 100 miles of a coast, so Mercy Ships came up with a novel way to reach them: a huge ship stocked with state-of-the art surgical facilities. Volunteer surgeons treat conditions like obstetric fistula while training local nurses and doctors and building surgical facilities in Africa.
Extremities
Open fracture
Condition: A break that leaves part of the bone sticking out through the skin and requires an emergency operation to repair.
Open fracture: Due to the frequency of automobile accidents, poor or nonexistent sidewalks, and inadequate workplace safety standards, 90 percent of severe fractures occur in developing nations.
Organization: Doctors Without Borders sends surgeons to conflict settings, where shrapnel makes fractures common. Orthopedic surgeons work in clinics that often don’t have basic equipment, including X-ray machines.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.