Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; son, Uchechi Iweala. Source. Twitter. Center for Advanced Orthopaedics

She was proud of her son that day. With eclat, Ngozi Okonji-Iweala, the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, put the photograph of her son, Dr Uchechi Iweala, on social media on Thursday, 28 October 2021. Her son, in concert with others, broke a medical record in Maryland, United States.

She wrote on Twitter: “Congratulations, Dr Uchechi Iweala, on being one of the first spinal surgeons in Maryland to perform a successful navigated lumbar spinal fusion using a robot! So proud to be your Mum! Keep it going!”

This shows that the medical world continues to make use of technology, the latest being robots.
S. Harrison Farber, Mark A. Pacult, and others from the Department of Neurosurgery, Barrow Neurological Institute, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix, AZ, United States, threw light on this:

“The use of robotic systems to aid in surgical procedures has greatly increased over the past decade. Fields such as general surgery, urology, and gynaecology have widely adopted robotic surgery as part of everyday practice. The use of robotic systems in the field of spine surgery has recently begun to be explored. Surgical procedures involving the spine often require fixation via pedicle screw placement, which is a task that may be augmented by the use of robotic technology.

“There is little margin for error with pedicle screw placement, because screw malposition may lead to serious complications, such as neurologic or vascular injury. Robotic systems must provide a degree of accuracy comparable to that of already-established methods of screw placement, including free-hand, fluoroscopically assisted, and computed tomography–assisted screw placement. In the past several years, reports have catalogued early results that show the robotic systems are associated with equivalent accuracy and decreased radiation exposure compared with other methods of screw placement.”
According to the Center for Advanced Orthopaedics, Dr Iweala is a fellowship-trained orthopaedic surgeon who specializes in spine surgery.
He obtained his Bachelor’s and Masters Degrees from Harvard, his residency training in orthopaedic surgery at George Washington University and a fellowship in spine surgery at New York University.
The use of technology across continents was on display again in June this year when open-heart surgery was performed by a team of medical experts, in concert with their foreign partners, at Afe Babalola University Teaching Hospital, Ado-Ekiti, ABUTH.

Aare Afe Babalola, SAN, top and Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, bottom

The Nigerian team was headed by Professors Tayo Adeleke, while that of the US was led by Paul Davies, a cardiologist. They also harped on the importance of technology. That is, they were able to perform the feats in all the patients operated upon “due to the expertise and hard work of the medical personnel in ABUTH and good equipment in the hospital.”

Aare Afe Babalola(SAN) founder of the university, also added that Nigerian doctors and other professionals are as good as peers outside these shores “but are being underutilised by the level of decadence in the system occasion by a paucity of equipment.”