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Article snippet: BAGHDAD — A young Iraqi soldier wheeled himself into a makeshift examination room in Baghdad’s best government hospital and used his elbows to climb onto the bed. Ripping off an array of straps, he removed a worn prosthetic leg so Dr. Munjed al-Muderis could examine his stump. Dr. Muderis, an Iraqi-Australian orthopedic surgeon, was back in his hometown for the first time since he escaped in 1999 after being ordered to cut off the earlobes of army deserters. He had come at the personal behest of Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has an army full of soldiers with limbs lost in the relentless battle against the Islamic State. Some 200 such amputees had been summoned to be triaged over two days. As he worked through the throng, Dr. Muderis, 45, never sat or even so much as leaned on a desk. When I asked at one point if this was the most amputees he had ever seen in a day, he replied, “It’s the most amputees anyone’s seen in a day.” He was looking for candidates for osseointegration, a surgical procedure that eschews the centuries-old approach of fitting a socket over a stump. Instead, doctors drill titanium rods into the remaining bone and attach them to advanced prostheses, creating more dynamic limbs. The technique originated with tooth implants, and Dr. Muderis has helped pioneer its use on arms and legs, operating on dozens of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at hospitals in Australia, Britain, Cambodia, Germany, the Netherlands and Lebanon... Link to the full article to read more