An Israeli doctor told a San Diego audience Sunday that his hospitals’ ground-breaking medicine helps patients all over the Mideast and enhances Israel’s role in the world.
“I still believe, more than ever, that medicine is a bridge,” he said. “We speak the same language in surgery.”
Dr. Rami Mosheiff of Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem described Israeli advances in treating victims of war, terrorism and civil disasters that have made his institution a leader in orthopedic trauma.
“Every disaster we learn and we publish…Our ideas are accepted all over,” he said.
Mosheiff was visiting California at the invitation of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which helps to fund Hadassah Medical Center’s two hospitals in Jerusalem.
During a presentation at the Hotel Del Coronado, Mosheiff described successful treatment of patients, both Israeli and Palestinian, who had suffered life-threatening muscle and bone damage.
He described how his hospitals had treated the victims and learned from each disaster. For example, he said, when a building collapsed in Jerusalem in 2001 during a wedding, the hospitals treated 333 people and learned that getting timely CT scans was a bottleneck.
“The CT department…was a traffic jam. We learned how to overcome this problem,” he said.
Mosheiff said that until the 1970s, serious orthopedic trauma was rarely successfully treated because doctors didn’t think patients could be helped.
Among the research projects underway at the Hadassah Medical Center are computer-assisted surgery, re-growing bones using stem-cells and robotic surgery.
Mosheiff is speaking to a number of groups throughout California. He was presented with a certificate of appreciation for his work by Audrey Levine, incoming president of Hadassah in the San Diego area.
