CHANGING LIVES THROUGH PLASTIC SURGERY

Pre-Mission 2024 Newsletter

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One of IMAHelps’ longest serving volunteers is Dr. Christopher Tiner of Pasadena, California.

Dr. Tiner is one of only a handful of dual degree (DDS/MD) surgeons in the United States with extensive training in both oral and maxillofacial as well as plastic and reconstructive surgery.

“I wanted to be able to work on a lot of different areas of the body and correct a lot of problems,” Dr. Tiner explained, adding that he didn’t initially consider mission work because he was simply so busy simply trying to complete his education and launch his career.

But after Dr. Tiner finished his third residency in 2007 at the age of 45, he received a phone call from Dr. Anthony “Tony” Gonzalez, who was recruiting volunteers to join a medical mission to El Puyo, in Ecuador’s Amazon Jungle.

“Tony had initially invited my dad, who suggested he call me. He reached out to me and explained the need. I had never considered mission work before because I was so busy.”

Dr. Tiner said the experience of volunteering with IMAHelps changed his life. “That first mission in the Amazon was so rewarding spiritually,” he said.

Not only was he using his talents as a surgeon, but he was using them to help people who could never afford, let alone have access to plastic surgery because of the severe shortage of plastic surgeons working in public hospitals in Third World countries.

“The challenge is there are so few plastic surgeons internationally,” he said. “Many plastics guys want to go on to cosmetics and make a lot of money serving wealthy clientele. The poorer countries can’t pay these skilled people enough money to retain them.”

That leaves a lot of patients unable to access the kind of surgical care they need. But over the course of his 18 years volunteering with IMAHelps, Dr. Tiner has used his surgical talents to literally change the lives of patients in impoverished communities across Central and South America.

Dr. Tiner said he has learned a lot through his mission work, too. During his first IMAHelps mission to the Amazon, he met another plastic surgeon, Dr. Christopher Johnson of New York City who frequently volunteered not only in Latin America, but Africa.

 “He was a great mentor,” Dr. Tiner said, adding that Dr. Johnson helped him learn how to work in Third World hospitals without “modern conveniences.” He encouraged him to bring all of the surgical tools he would need to do the kinds of surgeries internationally that he would do in the United States.

“That motivated me to be prepared to do just about anything in the scope of plastic surgery,” said Dr. Tiner, who travels on IMAHelps missions with several heavy suitcases filled with surgical equipment.

Over the course of his 18 years volunteer with IMAHelps, Dr. Tiner has had many memorable cases.

One of his favorites involved Santos de Cruz Meza, a 67-year-old woman from the tiny community of Trinidad, Nicaragua, who suffered from cleft lip and cleft palate deformities that worsened with age, twisting her nose while the top of her mouth produced a frightening jumble of rotting, unusable teeth.

“She wouldn’t dare go outside without a towel wrapped around her face,” said Guadalupe González Cruz, her 22-year-old daughter, told IMAHelps volunteers at the time. “Everyone made fun of her.”

Santos’s life changed, however, when she went to Brenes Palacios Hospital in Somoto, Nicaragua during the summer 2010 IMAHelps mission, where she met Dr. Tiner. Moved by her suffering, Dr. Tiner removed Santos’s teeth and shaved her maxilla so that she could be fitted with dentures. Then he sewed her cleft lip shut, closing the fissure that had subjected Santos to nearly seven decades of torment and ridicule.

“The first thing I’m going to do when I get home,” Santos told us, “is take a walk down the street, just like everybody else.”

Santos wasn’t the only dramatic case Dr. Tiner handled on the Somoto mission. Another involved 27-year-old Fernando Jose Toruño, who complained about pain and discoloration in one of his legs. Dr. Tiner examined him, and then asked him to remove his baseball cap. When he did, Dr. Tiner was shocked to see that Toruño had a baseball size hole in his forehead. Toruño had sustained major head injuries in a motorcycle accident and Nicaraguan doctors never tried to replace the missing frontal bone, which was necessary to protect his brain from trauma. Dr. Tiner could see Toruño’s heartbeat pulsating through the thin layer of skin covering the baseball-size depression in his forehead.

Alarmed by Toruño’s condition, Dr. Tiner worked with another IMAHelps volunteer, Dr. Jeff Cassidy, an orthopedic surgeon and former Navy Seal from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who removed some of Toruño’s ribs and relocated them to his forehead. Dr. Tiner also ground up some of the bone material and used it to fill in the hole in Toruno’s forehead.

Toruño’s mother, Maura Navarrete Castillo, was amazed at how well her son’s surgery turned out. “He looks just like before the accident,” she told us.

During the IMAHelps mission to Luque, Paraguay in 2019, Dr. Tiner removed facial tumors from 28-year-old Enrique Galvan, who suffered from neurofibromatosis, which some people incorrectly describe as Elephant Man’s disease.

Enrique had so many growths on his chest and back that IMAHelps President and CEO Dr. Cristobal Barrios, Jr. and Dr. Mark Kobayashi persuaded UC Irvine Medical Center to allow them to perform Enrique’s first surgery in Irvine as a humanitarian effort because of the dangers of performing such surgery in Paraguay without proper equipment. Dr. Tiner was then able to focus his efforts on Enrique’s face during the 2019 mission to Luque using his own equipment. Dr. Tiner was able to further enhance Enrique’s appearance, bolstering his confidence and changing his life.

More recently, during the 2021 IMAHelps mission to Quito, Ecuador, Dr. Tiner’s patients included 33-year-old Blanca Murillo, whose face was crushed in a motorcycle accident. Her facial deformities left her so ostracized by employers that she struggled to care for her baby boy. Blanca suffered personally as well. She not only lost her right eye in the crash, but the impact crushed her nasal passages, making it impossible for her to breathe through her nose. Her mouth was so disfigured so she could no longer close it, making it difficult for her to eat. Neighbors and other people in her community shunned her, leaving Blanca with a shattered self-esteem.

Blanca’s life changed, however, after Dr. Tiner performed reconstructive surgery on her face, using one or her ribs to create a new nose for her. He also reopened her nasal passages, which were crushed in the accident, and repaired her mouth, enabling her to close it with her lips for the first time since her accident eight years prior. “This surgery will improve Blanca’s quality of life,” Dr. Tiner told us at the time. “She will be eating better, breathing better, and she will look better.”

Blanca, for her part, said the surgery has enabled her to begin a new chapter in her life, one in which she is employed once again and able to provide for herself and her son.

Dr. Tiner will be joining the IMAHelps team to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic this summer, and looking further into the future, he said he plans to continue to volunteer on IMAHelps missions for “another 10 or 15 years,” helping to change the lives of the poor and sharing as many surgical techniques as he can with surgeons he meets in different countries.

“There are two types of people who do mission work,” Dr. Tiner said. “There are the people who try it out, and there are people who say, ‘This is outstanding and I’m going to continue to do it as long as I can.’ If you like helping others and making a difference, mission work serves it up on a platter for you.”