Surgeon says he will not perform operation again
An American neurosurgeon closely involved in the failed attempt to separate Iranian twin sisters fused at the head has said that he would now oppose a similar operation in the future because of the risks.
As Laleh and Ladan Bijani were buried in adjoining graves near their home village in southern Iran, Ben Carson said on Saturday: “With the knowledge that has been gained here, I would not do it the same way. I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about it and I would probably discourage people from it.”
Dr Carson, from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre in Baltimore, said the 29-year-old sisters had insisted that the operation should go ahead, even though doctors in Singapore warned them of the dangers.
“They absolutely could not be dissuaded,” Dr Carson said. He said members of the surgical team that operated on the women made “a great deal of effort” to try to talk them out of it.
“I think even if one minute before surgery, they had said, ‘We’ve changed our minds,’ we all would have been extremely happy.”
The women had simply reiterated that their lives as conjoined twins “were worse than death”, Dr Carson said.
Dr Carson, who has performed three successful surgeries on infant conjoined twins, was one of three leading surgeons who with two dozen specialists and 100 assistants conducted the 52-hour operation at Singapore’s Raffles Hospital.
The decision to operate on the twins had been reviewed by an ethics committee that included not only medical people but clergy and politicians.
Dr Carson also revealed that many hours into the surgery he felt strongly surgeons should stop - even though Ladan and Laleh earlier had asked doctors to continue at all costs - because surgeons had discovered a new, unexpected circulatory pattern in the twins’ brains.
But he said a relative of the twins, whom he did not identify, vetoed the idea. From that point, he said, “we all knew that at least one of them would die”.
Dr Carson considered Ladan and Laleh’s deaths a tragedy, but said a great deal had been learnt from the surgery.
“What they have contributed to medical science will live far beyond them,” he said.
His comments will compound the anger of the twins’ adoptive parents, Alireza Safaian and Iran Karmi, who were bitterly opposed to the operation. Dr Safaian is considering legal action against the Raffles Hospital, where the twins died last Tuesday.
The Telegraph, London; Reuters
