Kashmir-born Muslim surgeon separates conjoined Jewish Israeli twins to give them a new life

<p>
A Kashmir-born Muslim neurosurgeon from London has helped separate Jewish Israeli conjoined twins giving them a normal life to the immense joy of their parents.</p>
<p>
Dr. Noor Ul Owase Jeelani, a renowned paediatric neurosurgeon, said that the fact that a Kashmir-born Muslim doctor scrubbed up alongside an Israeli team to help a Jewish family was a reminder of the universal nature of medicine, the Times of Israel said in a report on Sunday.</p>
<p>
“We’ve been involved right from the start, talking to the team in Israel and planning it with them over a period of six months,” he said.</p>
<p>
Staff at Israel’s Soroka University Medical Centre in Beersheb successfully completed the operation and said that the babies are now likely to grow up to live normal lives.</p>
<p>
“It was a fantastic family that we helped,” he stated. ”As I’ve said all my life, all children are the same, whatever colour or religion,” he said. “The distinctions are man-made. A child is a child. From a doctor’s point of view, we’re all one,” The Times of Israel cited Dr Jeelani as saying.</p>
<p>
He said he found the family’s delight at the success of the operation deeply moving. “The mother simply couldn’t believe it, we had to pull up a chair to help her to calm down.”</p>
<p>
Dr. Jeelani who works at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, has performed four other separation surgeries on twins who were conjoined at the head with fused skulls, intertwined brains, and shared blood vessels. He and his colleague, Professor David Dunaway, are seen as the world’s experts on such cases.</p>
<p>
The Israeli medical team managed this with his presence despite never having performed such a complex surgery, which involved on-the-spot decisions regarding which blood vessel to give to which twin, and assessing in real-time the impact that immediate decisions were having on the functioning of the brains.</p>
<p>
Jeelani directs a nonprofit, Gemini Untwined, to plan and perform such operations. When doctors at Soroka needed to prepare for the operation, they reached out to him. He agreed, for the first time, to operate outside the UK.</p>
<p>
“This latest surgery fulfills a key objective of our charity, namely, to empower local teams abroad to undertake this complex work, successfully utilizing our experience, knowledge, and skills gained over the past 15 years with our previous four sets of twins,” he further stated in the interview to the Times of Israel.</p>