A well-known surgeon who exposed major inadequacies in medical trauma care promised to the Haitian people by the Clinton Foundation after the non-profit raised over $30 million dollars in donations following the devastating 2010 earthquake was found dead in his upscale apartment Sunday with a stab wound to the chest.
Dr. Dean Lorich, 54, was found lying dead on the bathroom floor of his apartment by his 11-year-old daughter with a knife sticking out of his chest.
The predominant surgeon gained notoriety after operating on U2’s frontman Bono and former running back Michael Cox but had also worked overseas in Haiti where he discovered an almost non-existent medical effort backed by the Clinton Foundation.
In fact, in January of 2010, Dr. Lorich sent a detailed email to a confidant which ended up getting forwarded to Cheryl Mills who was Counselor and Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time before being forwarded on again to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The doctor’s correspondence, provided by Wikileaks, was critical of how the situation in Haiti was being handled.
“Disaster management on the ground was nonexistent,” the doctor wrote. ” Cheerios on the tarmac are not getting it done on these patients which clearly would be savable if good care could urgently be provided.”
However, the email was only a precursor to the bombshell the doctor dropped publically just days later on Jan. 25, 2010, in a piece for CNN titled “Doctors: Haiti medical situation shameful” which detailed the conditions overseas and again the doctor took veiled shots at the Clinton Foundation.
“Once we arrived, we saw a severely damaged hospital with no running water and only limited electrical power, supplied by a generator. Surgeries were being performed in the equivalent of a large storage closet, where amputations were performed with hacksaws,” the doctor wrote. “This facility could not nearly accommodate our equipment nor our expertise to treat the volume of injuries we saw.”
That’s when the medical team decided to go with ‘Plan B’ which was to set up at the Community Hospital of Haiti located several miles away. However, what the team found when they arrived at the hospital was horrific at best.
Dr. Lorich wrote:
“We found scores of patients with pus dripping out of open extremity fractures and crush injuries. Some wounds were already ridden with maggots.
“About a third of these victims were children. The entire hospital smelled of infected, rotting limbs and death. Later on, we would judge our surgical progress by the diminishment of the stench.
“In our naïveté, we didn’t expect that the two anesthesia machines would not work; that there would be only one cautery available in the entire hospital to stop bleeding; that an operating room sterilizer fit only instruments the size of a cigar box; that there would be no sterile saline, no functioning fluoroscopy machine, no blood for transfusions, no ability to do lab work; and the only local staff was a ragtag group of voluntary health providers who, like us, had made it there on their own.”
As a caveat, the doctor added, “Upon our departure, we witnessed pallets of Cheerios and dry goods sitting on the tarmac helping nobody. Yet our flight of critical medical equipment and personnel had been canceled, and the equipment that did get through was hijacked.”
Did the doctor’s persistence wind up getting him added him to the Clinton body count?
Via HalTurner Radio Show / References: WikiLeaks.org; CNN.com
