Prof. Jerome Posner was invited to Israel by Hadassah Medical Organization Dir.-Gen. Prof. Shlomo Mor-Yosef.
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICHnice sharon 88(photo credit: )
Prof. Jerome Posner, a world-renowned coma expert at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, was brought in especially on Sunday to see Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem's Ein Karem neighborhood. He spoke to the family and examined Sharon, who remains in serious but stable condition and in a coma more than three weeks after he suffered a devastating hemorrhagic stroke and underwent three brain operations.
Posner, who has written a major book on the subject of comas, was invited to Israel by Hadassah Medical Organization Dir.-Gen. Prof. Shlomo Mor-Yosef. Hadassah spokeswoman Yael Bossem-Levy declined to provide any details about what Posner said. She also would not say if and when the prime minister will be transferred to a rehabilitation hospital such as Beit Loewenstein in Ra'anana.
She did say, however, that the amount of brain damage suffered by Sharon cannot be determined at present by electroencephalograms he has undergone; only brain waves can be measured.
Posner, a neurologist and brain researcher at the Manhattan medical center, is an internationally renowned authority on cancer of the nervous system and has been actively involved in the field since the 1960s. He has classified and codified the diagnosis and management of neurological complications from cancers that arise outside the nervous system, has participated in clinical trials of the management of primary brain tumors and is a leader in rare cancers in which parts of the nervous system degenerate in association with small tumors elsewhere in the body. However, when asked about his specialty, Bossem-Levy said that he was invited because of his expertise in comas and not in neurological cancer, which Sharon does not have.
