[ALUMNUS PROFILE]

In Russia, most physicians don’t
smile at their patients
or pat them on the shoulder or
stroke their hand, which was
something Rictor did
to show he cared

Kenneth W. Rictor, ’85, models his life on a simple biblical passage: “Clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”

Over the past three years, Rictor has done just that. He has left his comfortable home in Boonsboro, Md., and his bustling practice to help those in need.

Rictor, age 50, travels thousands of miles to remote regions of the Russian Federation to care for the poor and abandoned. They suffer from diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, thyroid conditions and alcoholism. “There are a lot of hurting people out there,” he says. “It has changed my perspective on life; just how good we have it and how we have to give back.”

Rictor is preparing to make his fourth humanitarian mission to Russia in November, only this time, in addition to treating patients, he will be working with the Russian Minister of Health from Samara—one of the country’s largest cities located in the southeastern part of European Russia—to help establish an ethics society and develop ethical guidelines for the equitable treatment of patients. “They are looking for international cooperation,” Rictor says. “To be trusted and to bring in our expertise is really huge.”

According to Rictor, Russian doctors want reform. They are paid $350 a month compared with the average worker who makes twice as much. Some doctors supplement their income by bribing patients; an ambulance ride or a prompt follow-up visit might require an under-the-table payment. They also face prison if a mistake leads to a patient’s death. So, there is little incentive to report them.

It was the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans that spurred Rictor into action. He called Doctors Without Borders, but they had all the physicians they needed. So he tried Agape Medical Center, an organization that treats Russians living in the most isolated and often desolate areas of the country. “I felt a pull to go out and help,” Rictor says. “I wanted to go out of my comfort zone. I wanted to go some place where it was rugged.”

The trips have been eye opening.

His first was to the town of Volgarch, a two-day train ride from Moscow, where he and 37 others stayed at a hospital. Some of the rooms were flooded while others were in disrepair. Rubber gloves hung to dry for a second use. Furnaces fired by coal generated heat. The streets were covered with nearly a foot of ice, and the only way to travel was either by reindeer and sleigh or in vehicles equipped with huge spikes on their wheels. “We were slipping like we had no traction underneath us,” he says. “It was very stark. I couldn’t tell where the people lived. I thought the buildings were abandoned. It was desolate.”

Most of the patients were women and children since the men worked in other cities during the week. Some 54 percent of the men were alcoholics. “We didn’t need to understand the language to communicate,” Rictor says. “They were overwhelmed with how we cared about them.”

In Russia, most physicians don’t smile at their patients or pat them on the shoulder or stroke their hand, which was something Rictor did to show he cared.

“It was amazing how many people would hug me,” he says. “My gift of caring was tremendously healing. I said to a friend, ‘People who have nothing appreciate everything. People who have everything appreciate nothing.’”

During another mission, Rictor traveled to Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle and a strategic Russian military installation. A college student traveling with the group took a picture of a military facility. Immediately, the group was arrested and taken by bus to a military police station. For five hours the physicians were held and in the end forced to pay a bribe. Rictor coughed up $5.

Last year, he and four physicians traveled to Tashtagol in southern Siberia, a coal mining town, where they stayed with a local pastor. The physicians hopped into a van and traveled to nearby villages to offer care. In Kondoma, a village of about 340 people, the local honey-making business had died, and the villagers survived by growing their own food and raising cattle. “It looked like a town of shacks,” Rictor recalls.

Rictor and his colleagues treated the entire population. One villager stored potatoes under her bed. A coal stove heated her house, but when Rictor entered the home he could see his breath. There were cracks in the windows and snow blew in through breaks in the door. She tried to keep warm at night by covering her mattress with coats. “It was crazy,” Rictor says. “How could it get any worse? But people were surviving.”

One of three children, Rictor grew up in Salisbury, Md. His father was an engineer with the telephone company and his mother a housewife. Rictor thought he wanted to become a doctor when he was five years old. One year on Christmas morning his parents gave him a doctor’s kit and snapped a picture of their precocious son administering a thermometer to his brother. “It was prophecy,” says Rictor.

By the time he was in sixth grade, Rictor volunteered at the local hospital transporting patients to their rooms or to radiology. He delivered X-rays and eventually learned to read them with the help of the radiologist. He worked Saturday and Sunday afternoons until he was in eighth grade.

After graduation from Maryland in 1985, he trained at Washington Hospital in Washington, Pa. Rictor focused on family practice because it offered variety, and he liked working one-on-one with patients. “Family medicine was ideal,” he says. “For a broken bone, I set it. Surgery that needed to be done, I assisted. We spent gobs of time in the emergency room. It was hands on medicine. When I was on call at night, I was it. I just flew by the seat of my pants.”

Since opening a practice in 1989, he has thrived on patients with a variety of needs, some whose medical issues have led him to diversify his practice. He is an expert on obesity and wrote a book on the stresses and strains faced by care givers. He conducts clinical trials on new medicines for Alzheimers, and in 2006, Rictor opened the Laser Rejuvenation Center to treat people with pigment lesions, unwanted hair and unsightly veins. These activities bring in revenue and help finance Rictor’s overseas missions.

Rictor is anxious about his upcoming Russian trip in November. “I’ve always wanted to do something to give back,” Rictor concludes. “I want to take care of patients for the sheer sense of caring for people. This is the way medicine should be; it’s a calling"