The world's most important doctor to millions in the war-torn and remote villages of Sudan | Tom Catena, M.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, we're going to be re-broadcasting my conversation with Dr. Tom Catena, which was originally released in February of 2019 Prior to interviewing Tom, I had known about him for three years, but this interview was the first time I met Tom in person. And it's actually the first time in my life that I was ever nervous prior to meeting another human being. And of course, this is incredibly ironic, because when you meet Tom, and this of course will come across in the episode, he is quite simply the most humble person you can imagine. But I see in Tom what I consider to be the greatest of any qualities or characteristics in a person. And it really humbled me to meet him that day and to continue to get to know him better and better over the years since that time.
Since about the year 2000, Tom has been a missionary physician in Africa, initially working in Kenya. And then in about 2008, he moved to a region of South Sudan called the Nuba Hills or the Nuba Mountains, where he continues to take care of about three quarters of a million to a million people. At the time, he was the only physician in the area and there's a single hospital there. It's hard to describe how few resources he has to run it. This is something he'll explain in the podcast. It's really nothing short of a miracle. As an update to Tom's work, after several years of relative calm, Sudan is again beseeched with conflict. This time there was fighting between factions of the government. This civil war has inflicted widespread damage across the Sudanese health system. However, even with all of this, Tom's hospital is still functioning and caring for the wounded. Not only that, but the hospital now has its own clinical training school, which has 19 physician assistant students and 30 midwife students.
In 2008, when the hospital was founded, there were 15 staff members, including Tom and a few expatriate Catholic nuns, and the local Nuba were not formally trained at the time. As of today, there were 270 staff and over 50 formally trained Nuba health workers, including nurses, pharmacists, laboratory technicians, and anesthetists.
And the first woman doctor from the besieged area of the Nuba Mountains is now also working with Tom. In my conversation with Tom, we talk about a lot of things. We cover some of the unimaginable suffering that he sees and how he himself copes with death and copes with being in a situation that I certainly don't think I could be in, and I suspect many of you listening would relate to that. We talk about a crisis of purpose. I think it's easy to look at what Tom does and feel sorry for him or feel sorry for the people that he serves, but I must admit, I came away from this interview actually feeling more sorry for us in a way. And Tom so eloquently, without judgment, explains some of the differences between people with all the privilege in the world, like most of us listening to this, and the people that he serves. We also talk about the sense of community that exists in Nuba. And what you start to realize is that the way we die in this country and the way that we live in this country is so different from the way that people live and die in other parts of the world. It's not surprising that people there don't die from complications of type 2 diabetes, but instead they die from infectious diseases and trauma. There's also a more subtle point here, which is that we are in many ways prisoners of our own world and our own mind and our own possessions. Tom's work is so important to me that I wanna be sure anybody listening to this can get access to all the notes that we're going to put together on this topic. And as such, for this episode, the show notes will be free and available to everyone, including those who are not subscribers.