Recent Media
The medical field is growing and transforming quicker than us lay people can keep up with. Every time we visit Taiba
Hospital to meet with a new specialist we learn about how amazing, and how far, we have come in the medical sciences
and how treatment and the management of illness has improved in our lifetimes. Dr. Tarek Sinan, Professor, lecturer at
Kuwait University and Consultant of Interventional Radiology introduced us to the wonderful field that can benefit and
improve the lives of so many people.
Dr. Sinan didn’t dream of becoming a doctor as a child. He was an industrious and intelligent student and when he graduated from high
school he was the fifth in the country. “People who have the highest grade are supposed to go to medicine,” he explained, “and there was
a scholarship to go to medicine in Ireland, so I decided to go for it.” He would have preferred to become an engineer, physicist or a scientist.
Figuring out puzzles and solving problems is a skill that comes naturally to him and engages his brain. He eventually arrived at a place where
he is doing just that. Life works in interesting ways, Dr. Sinan became a surgeon and practiced until the Iraqi invasion. As a field doctor he had to contend with devastation, atrocities and personal difficulties which pushed him to rethink his career. He wanted to do something different and settled on Interventional Radiology, at the time, this field was still quite new, controversial but highly sought after. His years of surgery experience paid off, and made the transition easier. Unlike other doctors, he was not squeamish about the body and felt more at ease diagnosing and treating patients. Interventional Radiology is a medical subspecialty that allows doctors to perform a variety of minimally-invasive procedures (compared to conventional surgery) using medical imaging guidance, such as x-ray fluoroscopy, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, or ultrasound. Not only do patients need less downtime after a procedure, it is also much more economical in terms of time and money to choose interventional radiology over invasive surgery. And every year, there are new diseases and conditions that are added to the list of things that can be treated with interventional radiology. “We can treat all the systems in
the body, [with Interventional Radiology], for example in the brain, we can treat aneurysms which is a deadly disease that can kill young healthy people,” he explained.
