developing nations.
South Australian dentist Dr Dick Milner has taken his desire to help the helpless further than most, travelling around the world to give free care to those who need it most. By Kylie Fleming
Community-spirited dentist Dr Dick Milner has never been afraid to step out of his comfort zone. Dr Milner, aged 71, from Concordia in South Australia, has spent the past 30 years making regular trips to developing nations to carry out volunteer work for the world’s most needy dental patients. He was awarded an Order of Australia medal this year for service to the community and this volunteer work made possible through Rotary International.
Since 1985, Dr Milner has made 15 six-week missions to the Philippines, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Thailand, Guatemala, Mexico and Nauru where he ran free dental clinics. Dr Milner raises money for the trips and dental equipment through his local Rotary Club of Gawler Light.
“I feel honoured and humbled by the award. I’ve never done anything I didn’t want to do, so it’s a bit hard in a way to understand why,” says the dentist. “I sometimes say there is a great need out there and someone has to do something about it and I’ve never been able to convince myself it shouldn’t be me.”
Dr Milner, who was born in South Yorkshire and has a dental degree from the UK’s Durham University, says the volunteer work is rewarding but can be challenging with complicated dental problems and limited equipment.
“I remember doing endodontics on a Buddhist priest in a refugee camp for Vietnamese boat people in the Philippines, and doing the procedure by feeling alone due to lack of X-ray,” he says. “I was told it was still okay three years later, so I must have got it correct!”
He also visited a “pretty primitive” Tibetan school with around 400 children, many who hadn’t seen a dentist in five years, if at all. “There was one lad who’d fractured his tooth and he had a millimetre and a half of exposed nerve for about six weeks and I had no idea how he’d lived with it,” he says.
Three-quarters of the world’s population has no access to the most simple dental pain relief and Dr Milner says it can be heartbreaking to see the gratitude on the faces of those he has helped.
“There are really thousands and thousands of little, daily occurrences, or gratitude, that sometimes leave you in tears at the end of the day,” he says.
Dr Milner recalls a remarkable moment when working at a Tibetan settlement in Himachal Pradesh where he met an Indian man suffering chronic dental pain.
“This big, tall man was in debt bondage, in other words he was a slave, and he’d had an abscess for two years, bad teeth and a wisdom tooth so we took those out,” he says. “He dragged me in a big bear hug and was chanting something and I asked someone what he’d been saying and it was ‘today my gods have come’. ‘Milner the god’… it had a nice ring to it!”
Dr Milner constantly struggles with the contrast between what he experiences in poverty-stricken communities overseas and our own country where dental care is both affordable and accessible. “It gets a bit easier…the more you see and do. The first time, it’s very hard to accept that you come back and live like this when there’s all that need out there,” explains Dr Milner.
He spent an eye-opening time working at various dental sites based in Mount Kilimambogo just outside Thika in Kenya. “There was a famine in Kenya at the time of the Moi government and its idea of famine relief was to give one five-kilogram sack of maize per family which could be for 20 people per month,” he says. “So when you come home and see people here complaining and whinging about everything, it’s really hard to sympathise.”
Dr Milner admits to being “overwhelmed many times” in India by how people live and are happy despite the adversity of their conditions. “Talking to a fellow in Varanasi, he had a PhD in philosophy, and was working as a tour guide because the hours suited him,” recalls the Adelaide dentist. “He was trying to get me to comprehend just how the man living in a cardboard box on the pavement outside a Rolls-Royce, driving the millionaire around, did not envy the millionaire. I believe him as he was so committed but I can’t really accept it due to my own belief systems.”
Dr Milner’s travelling bug began in 1966 when he left England as a 24-year-old to start a new life in Adelaide. “It was a career move and I was adamant I didn’t want to work for the NHS [National Health Service] in the UK,” he says.
“I arrived in Australia with my wife Les [Loraine]—who was pregnant but we didn’t know it at the time—17 pounds and four pence in my pocket, and some very, very heavy carry-on bags.” The couple has two children [Rachel and Jeremy] and five grandchildren.
He originally planned to stay in South Australia for five years but went on to run several dental clinics around Adelaide and also began his enduring association with Rotary in 1975.
“I really like a quote from a past president which is that Rotary takes ordinary men and women and gives them extraordinary opportunities to do more with their lives than they had ever dreamed possible and that’s what Rotary has done for Les and myself as volunteers,” he says.
The humanitarian dental missions have all been organised through Rotary [with the exception of a stint in Nauru] and Dr Milner always takes along his wife Les, a registered nurse, as a dental assistant.
“We were once told that we did four times the work of a dentist working with the local nurses. We just get in and go for it, and it’s not always fun, but Les finds it enormously satisfying too,” explains Dr Milner.
The Milners’ first trip was in 1985 to Puerto Princessa on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. “We were working with Vietnamese refugees. It was my first time in a Third World country and I felt fortunate to have a qualification which I could use to help,” he says.
“Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve done hands-on dentistry. There are people who go with toothbrushes and do exams, but that’s not what the people need—they need dentistry, they often haven’t ever seen a dentist.
“You don’t have too much time to start a regimen so a lot of it, particularly in a refugee camp, is about pain relief.”
Dr Milner has made several trips in the past eight years to Mexico where Rotary has run a clinic called Aero Dentista in the oasis town of Mulege in the state of Baja California Sur.
“It’s the only dental, chiropractic and opthalmic clinic for 1500 square miles and I used to see patients who’d travel the first half day on horseback and bum a lift on a truck so it’d take them a day and a half to get to the surgery,” he says.
Dr Milner believes it’s better for patients to try and pay something, no matter how piecemeal, for the dental service.
“There was always some donation. If you do it for free they don’t respect it, and no-one is ever turned away. Patients might give two piastas which is about half a cent, and if they can’t pay, they still get treated.”
Dr Milner says the overseas trips can’t be described as holidays—the work is too arduous for that—but the global adventures have provided the Milners with a fascinating
collection of stories.
“In Kenya, one of the places we stayed in was a convent and I rather enjoyed being the only man in a convent and being the centre of attention!” says Dr Milner. “When we were in Guatemala, I’ve got memories of a very basic village ‘restaurant’ deep in the back blocks where we shared the kitchen and eating room with the family dogs, cats and pigs.
“It was also pretty amazing in Kasumpti [just above Shimla in India], when I gave a practical lesson in a school playground with an audience, showing a local doctor how to extract teeth,” he recalls.
The dental work is not glamorous and conditions are testing but he keeps going back for more. Dr Milner, who has a cheeky sense of humour, compares the experience to childbirth. “You’re out there and you think ‘how did I get myself into this’; you get a problem and you’ve got no idea how to fix it with limited equipment,” he says.
“But when you get home a month later you think, ‘ah, it wasn’t that bad’ and within six months you’re saying, ‘I’ll do it again’…so yeah, it’s a bit like childbirth!”
Dr Milner has just retired from work for the third time, is enjoying part-time tutoring for third-year students at the Adelaide Dental School and won’t write off the idea of more volunteer trips abroad.
“I like to keep myself busy,” he says. “I’m not very good at switching off. All I can do is change channels!”
