83EW IN OTHER NEWSJuly 2015

by Lauren Lipuma EyeWorld Staff Writer

desperately needed someone who could specialize in glaucoma care. Dr. Thapa agreed to join the Tilganga staff and to become its resident glaucoma specialist.

After starting at Tilganga, Dr. Thapa travelled to remote places in Nepal to set up eye camps and perform charity cataract surgery for local residents. During one of these trips, he operated on an elderly woman who had been blind for years and had never seen her grandson.

“When I her did surgery, it was miraculous,” he said. “She started crying and she was able to see again. That was a turning point in my life—I realized that this had been my calling. I had resisted studying medicine, but then [I realized] I was meant to do this.”

With a newfound passion for medicine, Dr. Thapa travelled to Australia in 2002 to complete a glau-coma fellowship and then returned to Nepal, ready to take up his post as Tilganga’s glaucoma expert. Through fundraising efforts, he established a brand new glaucoma wing at Tilganga, the Nepal Glaucoma Eye Clinic. With the hospital ready to treat glaucoma patients, Dr. Thapa plunged himself into doing research.

“Nepal needed a large epidemi-ological study of glaucoma because nobody really knew the burden of glaucoma [here],” he said. “I didn’t know how much money it would cost or all the infrastructure that would be required, but I was deter-mined just do to it.”

ophthalmology, but still felt that something wasn’t quite right. He did not want to give up on medicine after coming so far in his medical education, but felt little excitement at the prospect of being a physician.

“I was very frustrated again because the calling for music was so strong,” he recalled. “I was really not interested in my profession.”

Soon after graduating, he met some other ophthalmology students in India and formed a band called Donesis, named for the trembling of the lens. The band decided to try something new and use their music to support a cause—they started performing charity concerts to raise money for a fund for the blind.

“For the first time, I thought my music was helping people,” Dr. Thapa said. “That was really cool.”

Discovering a passion for medicine Not ready to give up on his medical career, Dr. Thapa returned home to Nepal and applied for a position at Tilganga. Although he applied to other hospitals, Tilganga was his first choice.

“It was philosophically the right place for me to go,” he said. “It was just a small eye center then. But the kind of work they were doing—the grass roots level of work—was really attractive … the hospital was not for profit, and at the same time it was going to be reaching a lot of people.”

Dr. Thapa interviewed with the hospital’s co-founder, Sanduk Ruit, MD, who told him that they

sing and play the guitar through listening by ear. Although it was his dream, he wasn’t able to pursue mu-sic as a career—Nepal has no formal music schools. In grade school, his parents asked what he would like to do other than music. “I said, ‘If there’s anything else that’s close to my heart, I would like to study med-icine,’” he recalled.

Attending medical school in Kolkata, India, Dr. Thapa earned his Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) in 1993. Although he couldn’t formally study music, he played in several bands during medical school. After graduating, he did not feel committed to practicing medicine—and decided to pursue his dream.

“I was frustrated because my calling was actually music,” he said. “I came back to Nepal and told my parents that I was quitting medicine and going to study music.”

Dr. Thapa took a year off from medicine and formed a jazz-rock band called Bypass. In 1995, Bypass recorded one of the first Nepali jazz songs, called “Andheri.”

Facing pressure from friends and family, Dr. Thapa decided to return to Nepal to finish his medical training, but he didn’t want to give up playing music.

“I decided if there was anything in medicine I would have to choose, I would choose ophthalmology,” he said. “[I knew] I wouldn’t have any night duties, and I would have more time to play music.”

He returned to India and completed his Master of Surgery in

Glaucoma specialist and jazz musician performs charity concerts to end blindness in Nepal

Suman Thapa, MD, PhD, director of the glaucoma service, Tilganga Insti-tute of Ophthalmology, Kathmandu, Nepal, has

achieved many firsts in his career. He is the first ophthalmologist to complete a PhD in Nepal. He started Nepal’s first glaucoma fellowship training program. He conducted Nepal’s first-ever glaucoma sympo-sium. But he’s achieved another first that is a little more surprising—he’s Nepal’s first ophthalmologist to be the lead singer in a jazz-rock band.

Many physicians have found ways to balance medicine with creative endeavors, but Dr. Thapa has gone one step further—he uses medicine to create opportunities to play music, and plays music to raise money to provide medical care. After struggling to decide which path to choose, this Nepali physi-cian found a way to merge both of his passions into one fulfilling and inspiring career.

Music or medicine?As successful as Dr. Thapa has been as an ophthalmologist, medicine was not his first career choice.

“Being a doctor was not really my dream,” he said. “I was a musi-cian at heart.”

Dr. Thapa has played music for almost his entire life, learning to

From guitar to glaucoma: Physician fuses careers in music and medicine

Dr. Thapa (second from left) and his band, the Rusty Nails Patients at one of Tilganga’s eye camps in a remote area of Nepal close to the Tibetan border

continued on page 84

EW IN OTHER NEWS84 July 2015

He began conducting a popu-lation-based survey of glaucoma in Bhaktapur, a Nepali district east of Kathmandu. Through his research, which became known as the Bhak-tapur Glaucoma Study, Dr. Thapa recorded the first data on the preva-lence and types of glaucoma, retinal diseases, and cataracts in the region.

The groundbreaking study attracted the attention of several physicians in the Netherlands, and one suggested that Dr. Thapa use the research as the basis for a PhD dissertation. He was initially reluc-tant, but a professor allowed him to enroll as a graduate student at Vrije University in Amsterdam while continuing his work in Nepal. The strategy worked, and after spending

just a few weeks in the Netherlands, Dr. Thapa received his PhD in 2011—becoming the first Nepalese ophthalmologist to do so.

Uniting his 2 passionsUnder Dr. Thapa’s leadership, the Tilganga glaucoma department has become a fellowship training center and the main referral clinic for glau-coma patients in Nepal. In addition, through a collaboration with the University of Iowa and the Johns Hopkins University, Tilganga physi-cians are now using an iPad app to screen for glaucoma throughout the country. But Dr. Thapa has found a way to have an even bigger im-pact on eyecare in Nepal—through music.

conducted 2 medical camps and have 10 more planned throughout the year.

The Rusty Nails also took part in Play for Nepal, a 16-band charity concert for earthquake victims, on June 20. They plan to finish the rest of their charity concert series later this year.

It may seem difficult to balance careers in both music and medicine, but to Dr. Thapa, it comes naturally. Music balances his life, he said, and everything he does comes from his heart.

“I really believe in karma,” he said. “As much as we want to earn money, I think earning good karma is also important—and good karma is harder to earn than money.” EW

Editors’ note: Dr. Thapa has no finan-cial interests related to his comments.

Contact informationThapa: sumansthapa@yahoo.com

In 2013, Dr. Thapa joined the Rusty Nails, a band he describes as a group of hard-core blues-jazz mu-sicians. The Rusty Nails picked up where Donesis left off, performing charity concerts to combat blindness in Nepal. Last year, they pledged to perform 6 concerts—1 every 2 months for a year—and donate all the proceeds to Tilganga to cover the cost of glaucoma surgery for chil-dren. So far, they have performed 4 of 6 concerts and raised more than 2 million rupees.

Their fifth concert was sched-uled for April 25—the day a 7.8- magnitude earthquake hit Nepal, killing more than 8,000 people and displacing more than 450,000. Al-though the earthquake disrupted the Rusty Nails’ concert schedule, it did not slow Dr. Thapa—he brought to-gether volunteer doctors of various specialties to conduct free medical camps in the hardest-hit areas of the country. So far, the volunteers have

From guitar to glaucoma continued from page 83

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Dr. Thapa examines a patient after the April 25 earthquake in Nepal. Source (all): Suman Thapa, MD, PhD

The April 25 earthquake in Nepal left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and flattened entire villages.