In 1977 Dr George Laquis gave up a very lucrative medical practice in Trinidad, and with his wife, Jackie, and five young children, moved to Florida. "It was during the boom years and I was disgusted as I felt all the morals of the country had broken down, and this was the wrong place to bring up my children. And medically I was dying."
In Florida, Dr Laquis, became an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of Miami's Department of Family Medicine, and at Nova South East in the Fort Lauderdale area.
Eventually, says this very matter-of-fact man "the five children all grew up in the States, but four now live in Trinidad, only one daughter lives in Miami, she is married to a Cuban-American who took over my practice but if she had a chance she would come back too."
In 1996 Dr Laquis had a heart attack and by-pass surgery, retired from active practice and returned to Trinidad in 1998: "I love Trinidad, I think all Trinidadians love Trinidad, you just get vex with the place." By 1999, Dr Laquis, a most progressive medical practitioner who had already introduced to Trinidad the MRI scan located near to the Stadium and the Cardiac Unit at St Clair Medical, designed and had made by a local company the Medi-Coach Mobile Medical Center, in which he serves those in need in the rural areas every Wednesday.
"The programme is co-ordinated by the Roman Catholic Church but not restricted to Romans" says Jackie. An announcement is made the Sunday before in the relevant parish church and the patients turn up in full force at the churchyard where the large white clinic is parked on the following Wednesday, as photographer Enrico Matthews and I saw when we visited at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in El Socorro. With help from his wife as receptionist, and a driver, Dr Laquis sees twenty plus patients from 9.a.m. to 1.30 p.m, free of charge, and provides medication to last until the next time he returns to the area which he says "should be in about three months as the circuit has settled down into a number of areas. There are no patients younger than fifty years as I am basically a specialist in Geriatric Medicine, this is restricted to older people."
This service to the community, despite by-pass surgery, says Dr Laquis "is something I must do, it's important and my little deal with God. Simply put, he kept his part of the deal, I am keeping mine. He will take care of me."
All medicines are sent from the United States under Operation Sample: "All my friends package and ship me samples. You cannot go out and see these people unless you give them medicines, and for chronic diseases which is what most elderly people suffer from you need enough medicines to keep them until my next visit. What you see all the time with these patients who suffer from strokes, diabetes, etc is that after buying one set of medicine they will run out and go for about 3, 4, 5 weeks without medication."
"They cannot run out with chronic diseases. I am going to see some people over and over so you make sure and give them enough medicine for the three months."
The Clinic travels far and wide, places like Talparo, Flanagin Town, Tabaquite. "Places I do not even know existed in Trinidad, some real poor areas when you go out there" says Dr Laquis "places not a man or woman working, you do not know how they living. The national wealth needs to be distributed more equitably. Nobody is doing a damn thing for rural areas in the country, everything is concentrated in the urban. The politicans are involved in politics in government rather than governance of the country."
What happens if you find cancer in one of your patients? I asked. "I refer them the best I could to government institutions but you lose track of them" he said with a shrug which intimated that Dr Laquis would prefer otherwise. "The fascinating thing about medicine in Trinidad" said an obviously upset Dr Laquis " is the way I left it, I have found it twenty-something years later. Trinidad's medicine is in the 19th century. We have to jump the 20th and get into the 21st century. The country has gotten accustomed to poor health care, and we have to demand good health care, it is a right not a privilege, it is a basic right. Only the people can do it. They cannot demand because they are simply not empowered but somebody will one day. It's all about empowerment, a very powerful concept of freedom. America's sense of freedom is very strong."
Dr Laquis finds Trinidad patients unbelievable and remarkably tolerant as 30% of all geriatric patients must use many different drugs "it is called polypharmacy and the interaction leads to side effects, also a lot of them take their own drugs here, such as, bush medicine on the side, and try to balance all of that."
Dr Laquis is strong in his belief that preventative medicine is crucial, the days of treating the sick are over. "This is the kind of contribution I am trying to make. Soon we will open the Life Style Medical Centre at Stone Street. Assessment, risk profile of the patient, early diagnosis of disease, a nutritionist, fitness expert, private gym, are all part of the programme to prevent disease, or if you have disease to prevent the consequences of the disease. It has already been pioneered here by Dr Geoffrey Frankson at his Wellness Centre and I absolutely acknowledge him. More and more people and the whole medical profession are starting to understand. At Life Style Medical we cannot afford treatment of disease. In America, the focus is on prevention of disease. Our model has failed and should be relegated to the dustbin of medicine. We must retrain our physicians and our medical students with a different mindset, until we do that we are just wasting everybody's time."