Israel Active

Neuroscientist Prof. Moshe Bar co-founded Israel’s Hedonia and created the computer game Mood Bloom to reduce negative feelings. It is based on a therapy called Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP) in which mini games require the player to focus less on circular thoughts.

Israel’s Beyond Air (see previously) has partnered with US-based Beyond Cancer to produce a form of immunotherapy for solid tumors known as ultra-high concentration nitric oxide (UNO). The ultra-high concentration of UNO is undergoing Phase 1 human trials.

Israel’s Health Ministry has received 7,500 requests from foreign physicians to volunteer in Israel. Nearly 5,000 are from North America and 1,000 from Europe. Many are not Jewish – they just want to help. 450 have Israeli licenses and the rest are being fast-tracked.

Mikey, a key member of the IDF Oketz search and rescue special forces unit, was severely wounded by a grenade thrown by a Hamas terrorist. She recovered most of her faculties in just a few weeks thanks to Hyperbaric oxygen treatment (HBOT) at Israel’s Shamir hospital. Mikey is a dog!

Dr. Nathan Ungar, a long-time United Hatzalah volunteer, saved a 70-year-old diabetic passenger who lost consciousness twice on an El Al flight from Bulgaria to Israel. Dr Ungar closely monitored the patient's condition until the plane made an emergency landing at Rhodes.

In 2023 at Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petah Tikva, a record 24 life-saving liver transplants were conducted in infants, children, and adolescents. Liver transplants in children are among the most medically complex. Two donations were from soldiers killed in the war in Gaza.

Thanks to two international scholarship programs, 23 nurses at Israel’s Rambam Health Care Campus recently advanced their studies to specialize in various medical disciplines. 96% of Rambam nurses currently hold academic degrees. The target is 100%.

Jerusalem’s Herzog Medical Center is supported by organizations in the USA, Canada, and the UK. The British Friends of the hospital have just launched a national campaign "Helping the Helpers"’ providing support for mental health professionals treating an increasing number of trauma patients.

Lynette Hoffman-Elharar remembers a time when Essential tremor meant she could not hold a glass of water or draw a straight line. Now, after undergoing noninvasive MRI-guided focused ultrasound (MRIgFUS) at Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus, she is knitting woolen hats for IDF soldiers.

35% of patients that died of Covid-19 were diabetics. This led scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute to discover that high blood sugar levels disrupted the immune system response to infection. They then developed experimental medication to reverse the sugar-induced dysfunction.