Doctor Devotes Life to Helping Children With Spine Diseases

April 16, 2010 — -- Dr. Rick Hodes went to Ethiopia to help victims of the famine in the mid-1980s. Twenty-eight years later, the American doctor still is there, singlehandedly saving hundreds of young lives.

"For me, I wake up every morning and I think of all of these people who are really depending on me to stay alive," he said.

Hodes is the subject of a new book and an HBO documentary airing this week, and he is the "World News" person of the week.

His patients are some of the poorest in the world who live at Mother Teresa's clinic in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They suffer from afflictions that are unheard of in the West -- tuberculosis of the spine that strikes children and causes twisted backs, collapsed lungs and death.

"I have a to-do list ... to try to get them proper medical care, to try and get them the important chemotherapy to save their lives," Hodes said. "It's an ongoing challenge."

Hodes has arranged for more than 60 of these children to go abroad for corrective surgery, raising the money for their travels himself on a case-by-case basis. He has also taken the orphans into his own home, adopting five of his own.

Click Here to Help Fund Dr. Hodes' Spinal Surgeries

Ten years ago, he met two abandoned orphans with tuberculosis of the spine -- one had a 90-degree angle, the other a 120-degree angle.

To get them the surgery they needed in the United States, Hodes adopted them, added them to his health insurance plan and brought them to Dallas for medical care.

"They had a really good surgery ... and then they came back to Ethiopia and they're been going back and forth ever since," Hodes said. "One of them is in 10th grade in Greensboro, [N.C.,] and he wants to be a physicist and one of them is now a freshman in college in Indiana and he wants to be a chemist.

"These are abandoned orphans who had no future at all," he added.

The cases and the kids kept coming. Now 20 foster children live with Hodes, many of whom are undergoing treatment. So far this year, he has 52 new spine patients.