An Indian-origin paediatric neurosurgeon in the UK has reportedly helped a group of Israeli doctors to give the gift of normal lives to a pair of twins conjoined at the head. 

Dr. Noor Ul Owase Jeelani was born in Kashmir and practices at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. This comes as he gave a nod to carrying out the surgery outside the UK on being contacted by doctors at Israel’s Soroka hospital, according to a report in The Times of Israel (TOI).

Mr Jeelani said, “from a doctor’s point of view, we’re all one” 

“He 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,” according to the report. 

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“It was a fantastic family that we helped,” Mr Jeelani added, and continued, “as I’ve said all my life, all children are the same, whatever colour or religion”.

“The distinctions are man-made. A child is a child. From a doctor’s point of view, we’re all one,” he said.

He further claimed to have been deeply moved by the family’s delight at the operation’s success. 

“There was this very special moment when the parents were just over the moon. I have never in my life seen a person smile, cry, be happy, and be relieved at the same time. The mother simply couldn’t believe it, we had to pull up a chair to help her to calm down,” Mr Jeelani told the Times of Israel. 

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The doctor had reportedly worked for months on the case. 

“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.

“This latest surgery fulfils a key objective of our charity, namely, to empower local teams abroad to undertake this complex work, successfully utilising our experience, knowledge, and skills gained over the past 15 years with our previous four sets of twins,” the neurosurgeon added.

The operation marks one of the biggest achievements of the medical team at Soroka hospital in Israel despite never performing such kind of a surgery before. 

“It involved complicated 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,” the report said.