Fort Lauderdale, Florida (PRWEB) November 07, 2014
Board-certified plastic surgeon Laura A. Sudarsky will donate her surgical skills in the Medical Missions Program for Healing the Children Florida (HTC), a not-for-profit organization dedicated since 1982 to providing volunteer life altering healthcare to children in need in developing countries.
Dr. Sudarsky, the only female plastic surgeon currently participating in the program, will travel on November 15th from Fort Lauderdale to Guatemala, where much of the population lives in poverty. During a five day stay she is expected to operate on 30 to 40 children at Hospital Nacional De Amatitlan, a government facility founded in 1862. Common procedures include craniofacial conditions, e.g., cleft lip and palate. These birth defects hamper babies during breast feeding and can result in ear infections and speech defects if untreated. Their cause is unknown. Other procedures include reconstructive burn and syndactyly surgeries (where two or more digits are growing together). Many families cook outdoors, and the children suffer burns from the flames. Fabrics are often not flame retardant, and clothes catch on fire.
Dr Sudarsky has been travelling with HTC for 20 years, and has operated on more than 2500 children during her medical missions abroad. She has served as the Director of Plastic Surgery for HTC and as a Team Leader for many years.
“The satisfaction of returning a child back to their parents’ arms after a life altering surgery is indescribable,“ states Sudarsky.
Many children with medical problems in developing nations live out their lives in a severely limited fashion or do not survive. HTC has provided first class medical care to more than 191,572 children in 100 plus countries, including the United States. Donated in-kind services provided by volunteers in 2013 totalled $ 960,375.00.
Fluent in English, French and Spanish, Dr Sudarsky has long been dedicated to “giving back” by working with underserved groups of women and children. She has been recognized by Operation Smile and Healing the Children for her multilingual clinics in impoverished countries, and she is the recipient of multiple humanitarian awards including a Certificate of Special Recognition from the United States Congress. Her travels with HTC have taken her as far as Afghanistan and Bangladesh where she worked with acid burn victims and Colombia during the height of guerilla warfare.
Dr. Sudarsky had been Chief of Plastic Surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital, New York. For many years she has been involved in research and innovation in the field in breast surgery. A pioneer in transumbilical breast augmentation (TUBA), she published a series in the Annals of Plastic Surgery. She taught the procedure to colleagues and continues to develop and refine new techniques. She has presented in national conferences and published in surgery journals. Trained in cosmetic/reconstructive breast surgery, she is also one of a small group of physicians to be board certified in wound care.
Dr. Sudarsky and Dr. Tracey H. Stokes recently announced the opening of ESSE, a joint practice focusing on aesthetic surgery of the face, breast and body, located at 6333 North Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33308; (954) 533-1671. According to some estimates, only one in nine plastic surgeons in the U.S. are women, suggesting that male surgeons handle the vast majority of cosmetic procedures.
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