Prof Dubowitz

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Gavriel Meir: An especially special patient…..and friend

For a practising physician all his patients are special and he has a personal commitment to them. They are also ones teachers in a continuous curve of medical experience and one can learn more from them than from the most powerful computers.

From time to time one meets a patient who is exceptional and brings a new challenge and a new dimension to ones practice. Such a patient is Gavriel Meir.

It is some three and a half years ago, in July 2006, that a close paediatric colleague asked me to see Gavriel and his parents as an emergency through my post-retirement monthly consultative clinic. The story was quite simple. They had just been given a diagnosis of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy out of the blue by a paediatrician and a very gloomy picture had been painted. They were completely shattered and needed some support and hope for the future.

I have been seeing Gavriel every 6 months for a full clinical assessment and I think we both look forward equally much to our meeting. I have also made a video recording each time on my digital camera and put him through his paces of running, jumping, hopping on one leg, getting up from the floor and going up and down the same flight of stairs. He has shown no perceptible changes in his activity over the past 4 years and at 8 years still remains relatively free of disability apart from the fatiguability he has always experienced.

When I first saw the boys with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy in 1957 I was very moved by the immensity of their disability and had a dream that there might be a treatment for this devastating disease in my own medical lifetime. As always it is a race against time, but for the first time I am beginning to feel reasonably optimistic.

And Gavriel in his own way has made a major contribution to the field by opening up a totally new avenue of research into understanding the intricacies of this mysterious disease.