Like a Sufi dervish following his master, Turkish surgeon Yaman Tokat followed Mehmet Muhlis Tekdogan, a well-known heart surgeon in Turkey.
It was a time when such transplant operations were neither performed at the Ege University nor in Izmir. Although such surgeries were performed in some other parts of Turkey, the results were mixed: some became successful, some resulted in failures. “In our case, someone, who knows the job, shows how it should be done, then, things begin to move towards establishing a system,” he explains. In Tokat’s case, it was Tekdogan who "led the charge."
“I learned how to do a liver transplant there with its full procedure. In 1994, when I came back to Turkey, I started doing liver transplant operations. The first time in the country’s history, my team was able to conduct successful operations with patients living for longer periods afterwards,” Tokat says, referring to the surgeries he performed in the Ege University.
Under Tokat’s leadership, Turkey’s first successful DDLT program was established in 1994 in Izmir. Five years later, he also established the first live donor liver transplantation program in the Ege University. From 1994 to 1997, Tokat’s team had conducted ten back-to-back liver transplants — each one showed amazingly successful results. The subsequent surgical feats shot him to fame in Turkey.
“We began doing like 100 operations per year,” Tokat says, referring to a period between 1999 and 2005, when he decided to move the whole liver transplant program to Istanbul’s Florence Nightingale Hospital. For 15 years, his team had worked there until he decided to establish a new center, International Liver Center, this year. He now performs all the liver transplantation operations in his new center.
“The state’s decision to fully support organ transplantation ten years ago was a very big step. But we also need to implement that decision in a proper sense,” Tokat says. Due to the pandemic, Turkey has particularly become an attractive destination for liver transplant operations, as Europe and the US have imposed various travel restrictions preventing people from considering them as an option.
I think Singapore for second, instead of Taiwan.
Where is india?
Taiwan, not India
Where is India on the list