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Israeli Doctors Teach U.S. Professionals about Emergency Treatment
(Israel21c) Lauren Gelfond - American medical professionals have a lot to learn from Israelis," according to Jordan Cohen, head of the Association of American Medical Colleges, one of 70 U.S. academics who joined a medical solidarity conference in Jerusalem on November 24-25. Israeli medical leaders described new tools. After being troubled by the uncontrollable internal and external bleeding in terror victims, Israeli doctors adapted a medicine used traditionally for hemophiliacs. "Novo 7 can be used with excellent results. It's not approved by the FDA, but we have been using it extensively and now there are international studies to examine it," said Dr. Avi Rifkind, Hadassah's head of emergency medicine. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Meir Liebergal showed slides of terror attack victims, including a fifteen-year-old girl with 50-plus metal bolts lodged in the tissue and bones of her legs, and another teen with watch parts embedded in her neck. "Computer assisted surgery takes a lot of time. And to remove one nut we need to take 10-15 x-rays, so we developed a new method to remove shrapnel from complicated places in the body without exposing the patient to a lot of radiation," he said. The American physicians planned the solidarity conference as a response to anti-Israel boycotts and divestiture campaigns. The Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston, Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, and the Hadassah Medical Organization in Israel sponsored the event. Twelve Harvard-affiliated academics signed-on, as did leaders from the National Institutes of Health, and medical schools affiliated with MIT, Cornell, and Columbia. "We want to make it clear to our European and American colleagues that there are a large number of Americans who not only oppose such boycotts, but who support Israel," says Dr. Benjamin Sachs, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard Medical School.