Diabetes Among Latinos Catches His Eye

When optometrist Albert Forbes took down the shingle from his 40-year practice in Los Angeles and retired to Oxnard Shores at age 65, he actually thought he was going to retire--as in stop working.

“Stayed retired four years,” the now 79-year-old silver-haired Forbes said last week. “Did the golf. Did the travel. Did the renew-old-friendships thing.

“But you can only catch so many fish and hit so many golf balls.”

So he decided to become unretired in 1990. He went to the sisters of St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard with this request: “Do you have any use for a retired optometrist?”

As a matter of fact, the sisters did. They allowed Forbes, as a volunteer, to set up and run a free eye-screening clinic, “slightly larger than a closet” once a month in south Oxnard’s La Colonia area. Two St. John’s nurses and two volunteers signed on to help him.

The client base was almost exclusively poor Latinos with no health insurance.

And because of that first little clinic in La Colonia, and the eye problems he saw that were caused by undiagnosed or untreated diabetes in his Latino clients, he found a new mission: to stop, slow down or control diabetes in Oxnard, in Ventura County, in California . . . and now perhaps nationally.

Because of his work, he has been invited to address a Centers for Disease Control national conference on “How to Create a Latino Diabetic Eye Screening Clinic.”

The title literally reflects what Forbes has been up to since he retired from retirement: He’s become an expert on how to set up and successfully run free diabetic eye-screening clinics.

He now oversees one at St. John’s and another at the Ventura County Public Health satellite clinic on C Street, also in Oxnard. Today, his mostly volunteer staff includes other optometrists, nurses, translators, a volunteer eye surgeon, a dietitian and a pharmacist.

He continues to work for free, for one reason: Diabetes occurs at least twice as often in Latinos as in whites, and he is determined to reduce that statistic.

He knows he can too.

“Diabetes is so simple to take care of, and so brutal if you don’t,” he says. “Especially since Ventura County has a high Latino population, the consequences of untreated diabetes are enormous.”

Blindness, for instance. It was actually during his years as an optometrist in East Los Angeles that he first observed that his Latino patients had more diabetes-related eye diseases than his white patients.

Besides blindness, untreated diabetes can lead to strokes, amputation of limbs and death.

Forbes becomes passionate when he talks about how easy diabetes is to prevent and control.

“Just by changing your diet,” he explains to people who come in for a free eye screening. He figures that eating a more balanced diet is a pretty fair trade-off for warding off blindness, a stroke or loss of a limb.

As with many other diseases, he said, one inherits a predisposition for diabetes from parents. “And we know it’s genetically much more common in Latinos and American Indians.”

But those factors can be dealt with or prevented by three key steps: Keep your blood pressure under control, keep your blood sugar under control and keep your diet under control--which means not becoming overweight and not eating high-fat foods.

“I can’t over-stress the importance of controlling your weight by a good diet with this disease.”

These are some of the things that Forbes will tell the Centers for Disease Control conference on diabetes. Not that he will educate other conferees on the causes and treatment so much; instead, he’ll tell them what he’s learned about how to set up an effective clinic, and what works and doesn’t work in getting his patients to understand and follow medical instructions.

For instance:

* Dietitian Susana Bruzzone runs classes on the foods that are bad and good for diabetics. It’s no surprise that the hyphenated words “low-fat” are liberally sprinkled in her talk, in which she uses fake plastic foods.

* Pharmacist Jaesoon Ko Yonovitz helps people understand how to deal with medications, such as how to prick a finger to check the blood-sugar level and how to give an insulin shot.

* Iluminada Camacho, a bilingual health-education specialist, teaches clients to use special containers to dispose of their used insulin needles or pinpricks so that other family members or garbage haulers don’t accidentally get stuck.

* Volunteer Shirley Koog is ready if a client can’t read and therefore can’t pick out the E’s, Fs, Ps and Cs on a standard eyesight chart. She simply whips out a universal eye chart that has stars, moons, circles and squares instead of letters.

* Retinal surgeon Ma’an Nasir or optometrist Thomas Wolf can explain to those with already-serious eye problems what their next step should be.

“For me, the importance of addressing the CDC is another way of getting the message of my cause across: prevention or educated maintenance of the disease,” Forbes says.

“California has a million diagnosed and a million undiagnosed with diabetes today. And it’s on the increase.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FYI

For appointments at the free screening clinics in Oxnard, call St. John’s Regional Medical Center at 988-2865, or the Public Health Clinic at 385-8652, Ext 7.