AANS Neurosurgeon

While you might be spending time reading this article, I’m sure you’re extremely busy managing medical school and the countless hours that it entails with barely any time for other things, particularly for focusing on your money and how it is invested. That perspective needs to change as you begin your career and start generating income; after all, the...

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have warned of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) currently being used by cybercriminals against targets in the health care to infect systems with ransomware, notably Ryuk and Conti, for financial gain. Several hospitals across the country have...

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 pandemic as a worldwide public health emergency on January 30, 2020. It rapidly disseminated throughout Europe from late February 2020 on, reaching Croatian borders in the beginning of March 2020. Accordingly, to handle this pandemic better, health systems worldwide, including in Croatia, were forced to be adjust. All national surgical facilities,...

The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has had an incredible global impact. In March 2020, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) declared COVID-19 a pandemic.1 While worldwide “shutdown” initially slowed the infection rate, a steady uptick in COVID-19 cases has the medical community now confronting a second wave of infections.2 It is now clear that neurosurgical training programs must...

The sociopolitical pendulum has swung left. It’s about time; we have had some four decades of conservative politics in the U.S., from the mid-1970s to the mid 20-teens. These lines are never clearly drawn, but there is an essential truth to the notion that the prevailing political winds sway side-to-side. I am not favoring the right or the left...

As all are aware, 2020 has been filled with many significant challenges. Within the neurosurgical community, there is a heightened awareness of our many roles in training the next generation. For students at every level of the pipeline interested in the neurosciences, neurosurgery represents a career with an important purpose. For many students, early exposure in research and clinical...

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education on every level, from preschool to medical school, to continuing medical education. Who would have thought we would ever be forced to cancel all our regional and national meetings! But, these forces that put a hold on familiar events also made room for something new. The pandemic has speared a revolution in how...

The neurological implications of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have already started being reported in the literature, despite our limited knowledge on the biological behavior of this emerging corona-virus.1,2 A growing number of COVID-19 cases have been reported describing a wide spectrum of neurological manifestations.2 Encephalopathy has been reported in 7% of the patients in a series from Wuhan, China, while the...

For surgeons, wearing a mask feels normal – it’s part of our everyday life. The past few months, however, have demonstrated that this familiarity does not extend beyond the operating room. Donning masks at all times while in hospital is one of many daily reminders of how much the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world. While the morning temperature...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented global physical and economic suffering, disability and death. In spite of these tragedies, the pandemic has also provided an opportunity to harness time and technology to renew and organize a neurosurgical attack on a longstanding global neurosurgical problem: spinal dysraphism. The most common form of spinal dysraphism is the myelomeningocele (open spina bifida)...