Meet the Doctor Bringing a Life-Saving Cancer Screening to Remote Areas of the World
Dr. Patricia Gordon was on a medical trip to West Africa in 2012, traveling with a group of medical oncologists to bring a new radiation device to a hospital in Dakar, Senegal, when she saw something that would change the trajectory of her career.
During that trip, she and the team of doctors she was traveling with had some unexpected downtime and arranged to provide cervical cancer screenings in a remote area of Senegal. She’d recently learned that upwards of 350,000 women die of cervical cancer each year—an especially devastating statistic when you realize that this type of cancer is 99% preventable. “Cervical cancer is caused by the HPV virus, which has a 10-year latency period where it just sort of hangs out on the cervix and doesn’t do much,” Dr. Gordon told The Sunday Paper. “If you catch this—which you can do simply by looking at it—you can treat it in less than 30 seconds and cure a woman.”
Dr. Gordon used the “See and Treat” screening method, which can be done with just a few, transportable supplies: A healthcare practitioner sprays vinegar on a woman’s cervix and if it turns a little white in a certain light, a heat treatment (performed with a handheld cryotherapy device and CO2 canister) can cure up to 99% of all cases. When Dr. Gordon saw how helpful—and needed—these cervical cancer screenings could be, she knew she needed to do more. Soon after she returned home from that trip to Africa, she partnered with two other doctors and traveled to Ethiopia with cryotherapy devices, this time training nurses to perform the “See and Treat” method and continue these life-saving screenings.
In 2014—after 27 years in private practice in Beverly Hills—Dr. Gordon decided to devote all of her time to her volunteer mission: Cure Cervical Cancer. So far, the organization has screened 160,000 women and treated more than 9,000.
“It’s never too late in life to do what matters to you most,” says Dr. Gordon. “I kissed a lot of frogs along the way until I learned of the global epidemic of cervical cancer. But what I know now is that if you save a woman’s life in an impoverished country, you’re really saving the lives of her four to six children as well, who won’t grow up as orphans.
“You can volunteer by coming with us on one of our programs. You can donate money—it only takes $12 to save a woman’s life. But whatever you do, remember that it’s never too late to do something good for someone else.”
Learn more about CureCervicalCancer here.
