About Us
Our Story
Background
DR Rapiti has been in practice for over 45 years. Prior to opening his practice in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, he worked in a secondary hospital, Livingstone Hospital, Port Elizabeth, as a medical officer for 4 years in the departments of internal medicine; adult and paediatric surgery, paediatrics; obstetrics and gynaecology. After equipping himself with a great deal of experience in most of the medical disciplines, he decided to go into general practice.
He opened his family medicine practice in 1983 in Mitchells Plain to fulfil a life-long dream to work in a poor area, where he could utilise his vast experience on the people, who needed it most. In the eighties, medical services to the huge, displaced and impoverished population of Mitchells Palin healthcare services were extremely limited.
The healthcare needs of the residents were grossly neglected, so he tried to fill the huge gap as best as he could by providing secondary services at a primary care level. He worked tirelessly to fight against the injustices in healthcare delivery in the country. He constantly strives to deliver excellent services to his patients by ensuring that his patients are treated with dignity regardless of their status.
DR Rapiti maintains that pain reminds us that we are all equal, so the best treatment should be available to everyone, regardless of their station in life. His tries his best to achieve the goal of delivering the best service to ensure that all patients have access to the best quality of healthcare at a primary care level.
Covid
In 2020, when Covid hit South Africa and rest of the world, he became well-known for his successful management of severe COVID nationally and internationally. He treated over 3000 patients in his rooms with a 99.97% success. He treated people locally, nationally and internationally with his unique and unconventional protocol to treat patients with severe Covid pneumonia.
He earned the reputation of being referred to as the COVID doctor by his patients during the height of the pandemic. He successfully treated patients with oxygen levels as low as 35%. His patients include children as young as young as 6 years to the elderly with several comorbidities, who were in their nineties with severe pneumonia. He has over 300 videos of the successful cases that he treated for Covid.
Vaccine Injuries: During the early years of Covid, he came across a number of patients, whom he suspected of having complications from the Covid vaccine. He became interested to find ways to help people with vaccine injuries.
He developed a protocol to treat patients with severe covid injures like Guillainne Barre syndrome, Stiff person’s syndrome and blindness and has had a good deal of success treating them.
WhatsApp access to his patients: During the dark years of Covid, when it was hard for patients to find help, he realised the importance of being accessible to his patients. Every patient was given his personal cell number to contact him for appointments and to keep in contact with him.
During Covid when almost all healthcare facilities were closed, he felt it was imperative for him to stay in touch with his patients so that they did not feel abandoned in the event of a complication.
He had to act fast when his patients’ condition deteriorated. He realised that he had to do his best to save his patients because the majority of them were hesitant to go to the tertiary care institutions out of a fear that they would not come out alive.
Qualifications
After he qualified as a medical doctor he pursued his life-long ambition to go on studying. He qualified as a specialist family physician in 2006. He acquired diplomas in children’s health; mental health and asthma. He has done courses on diabetes; HIV and a course in the management of opioid addiction. He has treated a number of clients and their families for addiction, through his implicit understanding of addiction. In 2006, he qualified with an MBA in health policy.
He regularly attends continuing medical education meetings on zoom, reads widely and presents at medical gatherings to keep abreast of the latest in medicine. He has been a regular guest on a number of radio shows on mental health issues, medical and drugs related problems
Life Style management of chronic diseases
Dr Rapiti focuses a great deal on the life-style of his patients to prevent and manage chronic illnesses like diabetes, asthma and heart disease. He manages conditions like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and obesity extremely rigidly. He believes that, complications from any of these diseases, is a failure of proper management of the diseases at a primary care level. His latest interest is metabolic medicine, a discipline that was sorely lacking in his medical school training.
Keeping people out of hospital
Dr Rapiti takes a keen interest in the management of chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension and asthma to keep his patients healthy by avoiding preventable complications and unnecessary hospitalisations. In the forty-two years that he has been in practice he has not admitted more than 4 patients with asthma to hospital, with his hand’s-on approach. With this approach he tries to reduce the cost of healthcare.