When Dr. Patrick Code volunteered in 1997 to help the Vietnamese with their foot problems, he found a rudimentary health care system, few patients able to pay for help, and deformities, infections and wounds from land mines — "things you’d only see in a textbook here," he said.

The experience changed him, he said, giving him a ground-level feel for disease, suffering and poverty that he wanted to work against. Now he’s donating an afternoon a month at La Clinica del Valle, helping about 15 low-income patients each visit with foot ailments that might otherwise go untreated.

As a member of VolPACT (Voluntary Patient Access to Care and Treatment), a volunteer group of health care workers, Code does surgery at local hospitals — which also donate services — on the more serious cases.

What’s happened with exposure to real health-related suffering, Code said, is "an awareness of lots of people in the Rogue Valley who don’t have the care and resources to get well. They’re below the Oregon Health Plan threshold. I hate to see that."

When the working poor — those able to bring in just enough money to pay the bills and no more — come in for help, typically they make an appointment, find out the problem, then don’t show up for the next appointment, he said.

And, typically, doctors are trained in what to do, but not what it costs — and the costs keep going up, he added. The value of his donated services would total many tens of thousands of dollars a year.

"It’s 20 minutes of my life (per appointment) and I have the ability to give that. It makes a big difference in their lives," noted Code, who has a blended family of six kids with his wife, Sonna. "After Vietnam, I have a soft spot for kids. You see your own kids in their eyes."

Typical is the recent case of a house painter, who was supporting a wife and child in a small apartment and starting to get on the "slippery slope" of painkillers for chronic foot pain, Code said. Changes in basics such as footwear didn’t help, so La Clinica scheduled him into Rogue Valley Medical Center for an endoscopic procedure in which Code removed a bone spur in the heel.

"It was done quickly and he was back on his feet and off drugs, doing his normal work and making money," said Code. "Our work with VolPACT was prompted by the many uninsured and underinsured people who fall through the cracks and just don’t have any health care available."

In his two-week Vietnam visit, Code saw people pedal bikes 30 and 40 miles to access what to them was a group of

miracle healers from America and Australia. Most patients were children, many still being blown up by land mines left from the 1964-’73 war. Code is planning another volunteer trip to Vietnam in the near future.

"He helped a lot of children there (Vietnam)," says Mai Craft, a Jacksonville restaurant owner who helped set up the last trip and accompanied Code there. "He’s a good doctor and is very highly respected there."