Judge alumnus gives back through world missions

Photos courtesy of Julie Crandall

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Ethiopian men wait to see Dr. Alan Crandall and the team of doctors. Dr. Crandall said there is a backlog of curable blindness in Ethiopia and other Third World countries.

SALT LAKE CITY - Helping others see is a mission for a 1965 graduate of Judge Memorial Catholic High School.

For 13 years, Dr. Alan Crandall, has traveled to Third World countries training doctors and staff to perform eye surgeries.

Crandall is director of Glaucoma and Cataract, Senior Vice Chairman of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the John A. Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City. He will conclude his one-year term as the president of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery in April. After his election, he was invited by President Barack Obama to the White House with a committee, where he asked that they be assured access to care for children and seniors.

Crandall returned from Ethiopia the first week of March. He volunteers several times a year performing cataract, glaucoma and other eye surgeries, and has done so for the past 13 years. Crandall travels with a team that includes an anesthesiologist, and Dr. Jeofrey Tabin and Robert Hoffman from the Moran Eye Center have carried out missions all over the world including: Brazil, Bhutan, Cape Verde, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kiribati, Korea, Latin America, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Taiwan, Tanzania, Tibet, Tonga, Turkey and Uganda. Crandall said they perform at least 930 surgeries in a week.

"We take all our own supplies. Our goal is not just to cure these people, it is to teach the doctors new technology," said Crandall. "We pay for doctors from Ghana, Nepal, India, Bhutan, China, Ethiopia and Rwanda to come to Utah for three to six months to train. Then we go visit them to update their skills."

Locally, Crandall said he continues to do free exams at the 4th Street Clinic.

Crandall was the quarterback in high school and received the Mick Riley Award. He also was the student body vice president, and received a service award for his service hours teaching English and math to children at the Guadalupe Center in Salt Lake City. He said he learned service through his family who did a lot of charity work.

Although his father was an ophthalmologist, but Crandall thought first about becoming a priest and a chemist before following his father's career. While deciding what to do, his choices came down to ophthalmology or radiation oncology. He chose ophthalmology because he found it hard to deal with death and cancer, especially in children. "It takes a certain personality to do oncology and for me I needed to do something surgically that could have a good impact," he said.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating from the Department of Ophthalmology Scheie Institute. He did his residency, fellowship and was on the faculty there, but in 1981, Randy Olson, chairman at the Moran Eye Center, asked him to return to Utah. "At that time we had three doctors and six employees," said Crandall. I came as the cataract and glaucoma specialist. We have grown massively since then."

Crandall started traveling abroad about 13 years ago when one of his patients, Gladys Richardson, an African American, said she was going to Ghana to find her roots. She came back with a request for eye doctors who would visit Ghana to do cataract surgeries.

"I said, ‘Why not? Let's see what happens,'" said Crandall. "So we went over the first time with her. She was starting Harvest Africa, where she still buys books and pays for kids to go to school. We also went to Kumasi and Accra, Africa. Accra is where all the slaves were kept, and is where people find their roots. I went to the hospital and met with doctors who did not have any access to new technology or microscopes and their backlog of curable blindness was increasing. Then I realized there were a lot of children who needed help."

Crandall said the work they do renews them and rejuvenates them to give back.