Improving sight Downings life work

Monday, November 15, 2004

Dr. John Downing gets insight when he helps his patients.

Its a real kick to make people see, he said. You see someone whos not functioning well and not driving this gives them a lot of their life back.

Downing, a ophthalmologist, owns Downing-McPeak Vision Centers, which has offices in Bowling Green and Glasgow. His primary areas of practice are cataract and intraocular lens implant surgery and vision correction surgery.

We do anything that has to do with the eyes from fitting for glasses to surgery, he said. We mostly do cataract surgery. We have a surgery center in Glasgow. The whole practice does about 2,000 cataract surgeries in a year.

Downing grew up in Tompkinsville, graduating from Tompkinsville High School in 1955. He went to Georgetown College and Baylor University in Texas, where he received a bachelors of science degree in biology in 1959. He went to the University of Louisville School of Medicine, where he graduated third out of 91 students in 1962. He did an internship in internal medicine at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.

But it wasnt until he went to the U.S. Navy, for whom he served in active duty from 1963 to 1971, that he realized that ophthalmology was going to be his career path. He did his residency at the Naval Hospital and Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia from 1966 to 1969. He was in the 98th percentile on the National Residents Examination in 1969.

I went into the Navy and I was a flight surgeon in Vietnam, he said. I had a really good teacher. We did a lot of work in vision. I stayed in the Navy to do specialty training.

After finishing active duty in 1971, Downing came to Bowling Green and set up his practice, but he wanted to do more. About 15 years ago, he began volunteering with ORBIS, a New York-based, nonprofit global development organization that according to its Web site at www.orbis.org is dedicated to preserving and restoring sight by strengthening the capacity of local partners to prevent and treat blindness. ORBIS is best known for having the worlds only airborne eye hospital and training facility.

We go into developing countries and work with doctors there on how to do procedures, he said. So many places are short of physicians. Blindness is common. The problem in many of these countries is that they have little money and little equipment. This is a way to help them.

Downing recently received a service award from ORBIS. He devotes a couple of weeks each year to the organization and has visited various countries, including Bangladesh, Nicaragua, China, Lithuania, India, El Salvador, Myanmar, Bulgaria, Cuba and Ethiopia.

I go somewhere different every year, he said.

ORBIS now has its CYBER-SIGHT project that connects partner ophthalmologists throughout the world with one-on-one mentoring and case-by-case consultation via the Internet. Downing said the project is great.

You go into a country for a while and wonder if you did anything, he said. This way we get to follow up. Its nice when you have an ongoing relationship like that.

Besides his practice and volunteer work, Downing has been a clinical professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville since 1971.

Ive always been interested in teaching, he said.

His family which includes his wife, Sheryl, seven children and nine grandchildren also keeps him busy.

But he enjoys being busy.

I have no plans to retire as long as I can keep going, he said.

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