A new immigrant from Brazil has now performed the first robotic lumbar spine fusion in Israel. The 36-year-old Dr. Cezar J. Mizrahi works at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.
During an internship in the intensive care unit in a hospital in Brazil, he realized that he was more fascinated by neuroscience: “I wanted to change my specialty and I always wanted to go to Israel – that was my big opportunity,” he recalls. “I applied to some residency programs, and when I was accepted into Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, I said goodbye to my parents and brother and said, ‘Maybe I’ll come back in two months.’ They’re still waiting for me.”
In 2019, Mizrahi went to Australia with his Israeli wife and two children to study how to perform complex and minimally invasive spinal surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. In 2022 he came back to Jerusalem to apply his knowledge: “I contacted Dr. Nevo Margalit, the head of neurosurgery, and Dr. Yair Barzilai, the Head of the Spine Department, and shared with them that I wanted to apply the new approaches and techniques I had learned over the past three years. “They were very happy to have me,” he recalls.
Original Article Written By: Katharina Hoeftmann Ciobotaru
