One night five years ago, US neurosurgeon Daniel Spitzer received a frantic telephone call from the wife of a friend in Nepal. The man had fallen off a cliff and broken his neck. Was there anything Spitzer could do? The doctor bought a surgical halo, an expensive device designed to immobilise the neck to allow it to heal, and arranged to send it via Federal Express to Bir Hospital where Dr Upendra Devkota was treating the patient. But the box got stuck in Dubai even as the time of operation neared, because of problems of using a courier service to transfer a medical item.

After urgent calls (and threats) all around, the head harness arrived in Kathmandu as air cargo and was rushed to be fitted on the patient: journalist Kanak Mani Dixit, who had broken his neck in a trekking accident on the way to Manang. Dixit wore it for six months and after recovering, with the help of friends set up the Nepal Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Jorpati.

Spitzer (right) is in Kathmandu this week to attend the Fourth Asian Spinal Cord Network conference being organised at the Hyatt by the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre of Jorpati. Nepal's neurosurgeons, physiotherapists, and others working with the spinally injured are going to be attending the conference with doctors from Asia and Europe.

To ensure maximum benefit from his trip, Spitzer arrived on Monday night with six more surgical halos that he has been collecting from patients in the US over the past several years and five duffel bags full of neurosurgical equipment.