Dr Shankar Man Rai - World famous Plastic Surgeon

Shankar Man Rai, a reconstructive plastic surgeon and native of Nepal, has devoted much of his life to providing free plastic surgeries to children with birth defects, cleft lips and palates, and burn injuries in areas of the world where these disabilities and deformities can be devastating. Shankar Man Rai is 53 year old now , is director of the surgical outreach center in Nepal for Interplast, a Mountain View, Calif.-based humanitarian organization that provides free reconstructive surgery to people in developing countries around the world. Rai, who has worked in association with Interplast since 1992, he has transformed the lives of over 13,000 poor Nepali children born with cleft lips and cleft palates, apart from those suffering from burn injuries. All of them received surgery and follow-up treatment for free. since then, many of them children with cleft lips or palates or burns. Rai is the son of a career Nepalese army soldier and brother to four Gurkha Brigade soldiers who paid his way through school. Rai was the first in his family to receive an education, he said. As a boy, Rai hiked two hours every day at 6,000-foot elevations from his remote village to the nearest school. Today, it still requires a three-day walk from his village to reach the nearest road, Rai said, and another 18-hour bus ride to make Katmandu. But in the late 1970s, when Rai left home to go to college and then medical school in the Nepalese capital, he walked the entire way. 

It took 14 days, he said. "We work in many developing countries on three continents, and the story is typically the physicians there are from wealthy families," said Bill Schneider, M.D., a plastic surgeon and chief medical officer of Interplast. Schneider said he believes Rai's rural origins are the source of his dedication to the poor. "He is a very modest man, but he has done incredible things in Nepal," Schneider said. "It's almost astonishing what he's done." Due to political instability from a Maoist insurrection that has prompted a U.S. State Department advisory against travel to Nepal, Interplast has not sent U.S. surgical teams into the country for two years, according to Schneider. "But that's the beauty of the program," Schneider said. "He's doing surgery every day on the poor so we don't need to be there." Rai said he spends two or three days a week visiting rural hospitals, performing surgeries and rounding up patients at clinics outside of Katmandu in 52 of the 75 Nepalese districts that remain open to travel. As part of the outreach program, Interplast also helps pay for the parents of postoperative children to come and stay at the district centers for extended speech therapy. 

A Boy from Small nepali Village

Dr Rai was born in 1957 to a farming family in Makpa village of Khotang district as the second of five sons of a Nepal Army captain. Dr Rai also has three sisters. He went to various schools, as he was always moving with his father who had frequent changes of posting. After completing his SLC in first division in 1975, Dr Rai studied the three-year Certificate of General Medicine course at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in Kathmandu, becoming a health assistant first. He later did the MBBS from IOM, which became TUTH two years after he graduated. “MBBS was a four-and-half-year course back then. But we had to wait for six years to complete it as TUTH was shut frequently due to political instability,” he said. He then provided surgical services at TUTH for two years, before leaving for Bangladesh where he did his Masters in Surgery. His association with doctors from Interplast Inc later took him to Dallas, Texas, and to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where he honed his skills as a plastic surgeon. Apart from heading the initiative in Nepal, Dr Rai also participates in reconstructive surgery camps in developing countries, hoping to inspire medical professionals to take such initiative themselves and expand it as he has done in Nepal.



“I don´t need to worry whether a needy patient can afford treatment, as what we provide is free of cost,” he said, adding a question, “Tell me, how many doctors in the country have the privilege of not having to think about a patient´s financial background?”

This reward is far greater for Dr Rai than the Nathan R Davis Award in International Medicine and Public Health that the American Medical Association conferred on him in 2004, or the Unsung Heroes of Compassion Award that he received from the Dalai Lama in 2009.