Orthodontist extraordinaire practices worldwide Setauket doctor just returned from Nicaragua, team treated 120 poor children     James Dowd March 01, 2007
 
“I get back more then I give,” Dr. Leon Klempner explained at his Port Jefferson office. “I get an appreciation for what I have, it puts this in perspective. Giving back is important, and I feel so blessed and lucky to be in this position. I don’t see it as a big deal.” The tall, unassuming man is a dentist, but his office looks more like a salon. His manner is every bit the successful suburban doctor — he drives an Audi, and has a wife and three kids. For all his success, though, Klempner’s thoughts lie thousands of miles away, in small villages in China and South America. They reside with the hundreds of children he has helped and with the children he could not help. Klempner, who lives in East Setauket, volunteers his skills and time, far away from home, to reconstruct the faces of children who were born with congenital birth defects. He works with Operation Smile, a privately funded organization headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, to provide free facial reconstruction surgery for children and adults in the world’s most impoverished nations. Klempner is one of those rare people who seems heroic, almost despite himself. He is approachable, humble and self-deprecating about his work. He has completed 10 missions outside the U.S. since 1996, the most recent in January in Nicaragua. On his latest trip he saw over 250 patients, and performed over 120 surgeries to correct cleft palates and lips.
 
Cleft palate is the fourth most common birth defect, affecting 1 in 400 children in the developing world. It is hard to describe the devastating effect of the condition. Klempner has photos of horribly disfigured people with gaping open maws where their mouth and nose should be. In addition to dramatic cosmetic effects, the condition can be life threatening, since it severely affects the ability to eat. Often the condition is so bad that it makes it impossible to talk. One baby that he treated outside of Managua, Nicaragua’s capital city, was starving to death because he could not properly suckle. The doctor created a custom prosthetic palate, one of 30 he made on the trip, to correct the problem. In this country, where the condition occurs at a rate of about 1 in 800 births, it is rarely seen outside of the natal unit. It is easy to fix: The surgery takes about 45 minutes and costs only about $250. According to Klempner, “Cleft palate is a congenital birth defect, it is a failure of the roof of the mouth to fuse. You get a hole from the mouth to the nose, which can extend from the lip back.... You don’t see it in the U.S. because it gets fixed in the hospital. Usually the doctor just does it.” It is a different story in the third world. The deformity destroys the lives of the children and adults it effects. “Go to the third world — they [the kids] are on their own,” Klempner said. “There is a big stigma — these kids hide away and they don’t go to school. There is lots of superstition, the idea that it is the devil’s work or that it is the result of something the parents did.” Operation Smile operates in areas that lack even basic medical facilities. Despite the low cost of the surgery the burden of correcting the condition is monumental. In a society where most people, according to the doctor, “make less then a dollar a day,” most kids go untreated. Working in rural areas where people subsist on farming sugarcane, coffee, or rice, “A lot of children are with parents who don’t have enough money for milk,” Klempner said.

The Operation Smile team works 12-hour days over a two-week period to treat as many patients as possible. In addition to performing surgery the organization also trains local doctors and leaves equipment behind, in an effort to make the indigenous medical community self- sufficient. “We work hand in hand with local doctors on our mission,” said Klempner, “so they can help their own kids. That is the goal.” Klempner started his practice in 1978 in Medford and moved to his office in Port Jefferson in 1998. He is a graduate of Adelphi University, where he started out as a history major, and studied dentistry at the University of Maryland. He is also a board-certified orthodontist. His practice is primarily geared toward kids. His philosophy is to “create a positive experience for the kids, have a nice open place with friendly people. It takes away their fear.” His office has a unique design, with an unobstructed row of three workstations, each with its own flat panel TV. Because Klempner does only orthodontic work, there is “no drilling or blood.” He also adopted the “open bay design” to allow parents to be with their child during procedures. In addition to his practice, and his work with Operation Smile, the doctor has also volunteered for the Response Suicide Hotline, and is planning a trip to Vietnam with his wife, a nurse at Stony Brook University Hospital, as part of Health Volunteers of America, a government-funded medical outreach group. The doctor described his philosophy this way: “If you grow up here you get a very one-sided view of living. Most people don’t have what we have … it is like winning the lottery because you were born here. It is not because your parents were smarter or richer. It is because you were born here … The faces of the parents, seeing the child, that is the reason I go back. They may not remember us, but they will never forget what we did.” The doctor is on the faculty of Stony Brook University’s Department of Children’s Dentistry and serves as the staff orthodontist for the St. Charles Hospital cleft palate team. For more information about Operation Smile or to donate, call 1-888- OPSMILE or go to the web at operationsmile.org.