Rebecca Artz
Thirty-four teams of neurosurgeons from top medical institutions around the country competed on June 11th in New York City’s Central Park as part of the 13th Annual Neurosurgery Charity Softball Tournament. The event was hosted by Columbia University and benefited brain tumor research to the Andrew T. Parsa Honor Your Neurosurgical Mentor Fund via the Neurosurgery Research & Education...
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is often called the epidemic of the West. The socio-economic impact and ubiquity is often recounted in the introduction in scientific articles to emphasize the relevance of the work presented. To make the magnitude of TBI more comprehensible, in the U.S., one person incurs a TBI every 21 seconds, and every five minutes, one...
Primum non nocere (First do no harm) is a fundamental moral and ethical principle that is the basis of medicine's Hippocratic Oath. It begs the question, “To what or to whom?” The answer is obscured in a bewildering array of laboratory results, tubes, scans and telemetry. This dehumanizing process is often confounded by the use of medical nomenclature. When a...
As the premier funder of neurosurgical studies and education, the Neurosurgery Research & Education Foundation (NREF) focuses on providing fellowship funding in basic neuroscience and neurosurgical programs in North America. The NREF encourages institutions to apply for funding for clinical neurosurgical fellowships in spine surgery, endovascular neurosurgery, general neurosurgery, neurocritical care, neurosurgical oncology, other cerebrovascular-related fellowships, pediatric neurosurgery, peripheral nerve...
The field of neurotrauma provides unique career opportunities for neurosurgeons and is rewarding for the impact that successful intervention can have on the lives of patients and their families. There are many other opportunities to evolve as a surgeon and physician in this discipline including developing advanced surgical techniques, conducting meaningful research, educating others, participating in health care systems...
When patients experience complex health events, it often requires the collaborative efforts of practitioners to address the issue. Further complicating matters, the patient may not always be seen by the appropriate specialist first, second or even at all given the efficiencies created by technology. At what point and how specialists such as neurosurgeons become involved in a patient’s case...
While soccer is the most popular sport with over 200 million participants worldwide, other sports, particularly American football and ice hockey, have received much recent attention and have been singled out for their incidence of concussion. The truth of the matter is that essentially every athletic activity, especially those which have the potential for bodily collisions or head impact,...
The NREF is launching a campaign to provide ongoing support for the NeuroPoint Alliance (NPA) joint study with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The one-year cooperative project will develop, test and implement an approach to improving outcomes for spine surgery patients. “The end product will be a ‘tool kit’ for participating surgeons and hospitals around the nation to...
Why don’t we have a cure for spinal cord injury? We can put a man on the moon and obtain encyclopedic knowledge through the air on a handheld device, but we have not been able to cure spinal cord injury. Why is that? One reason may be the incredibly negative attitudes towards trying to repair the spinal cord. Several...
It was a dark and stormy night. The alcohol and cocaine didn’t help either. John Doe was found in an urban-slum alleyway behind a dumpster and surrounded by broken glass. A witness states that the patient was assaulted with a glass bottle, lost consciousness for a few minutes and then began to respond. Brought in by EMS and hemodynamically...
