Amish in need of more clinics

September 27, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

LANCASTER, Pa.

In 1998, five Amish families traveled from Northeast Ohio to a medical clinic at the end of a winding farm lane in Strasburg, hoping for a miracle.

They had read of the Clinic for Special Children and its founder, Dr. D. Holmes Morton, in Reader’s Digest. They knew the clinic, founded in 1989, specialized in diagnosing and treating inherited, genetic disorders in Amish and Mennonite children. The Amish families, from Geauga County, Ohio, all had children with undiagnosed disorders.

“The children had all been seen by the Cleveland Clinic” and specialists elsewhere, Dr. Heng Wang said. “But they had never seen a doctor like this.”

Morton spent hours with each child, though ultimately he was unable to identify what was wrong with the children. “But on the way home, all the families were excited,” Wang said.

“They didn’t have a diagnosis. But they did have an answer.”

The result was Das Deutsch Center for Special Needs Children in Middlefield, Ohio, opened in 2002 and based largely on the work of Morton and his Strasburg clinic. Wang serves as director.

Friday, he was one of about 30 physicians, researchers, academics and members of the Plain community who packed a second-floor conference room at the Strasburg clinic to talk about the latest advances in treating genetic disorders among Plain children.

Equally important, it seemed, was their desire to talk about why the Strasburg clinic has been so successful, and how that success might be replicated elsewhere.