AANS Neurosurgeon

The first case of COVID-19 was reported in India on the January 20, 2020, and the count as of  August 20 is 2,837,749 confirmed (still adding more than 60,000 cases every day) with 54,000 deaths and 2,097,331 recovered. (www.covid19.india.org) The Indian government has set up multiple centers for patients with mild symptoms in public schools, public halls, railway bogies,...

“Necessity is the mother of innovation.” Proverb “What is now paved was once only imagined.” William Blake, Auguries of Innocence Innovation is woven into the fabric of neurosurgical training. While during the senior years of residency, this takes the form of adapting operative technique or clinical decision-making to unanticipated situations, in the more junior years, innovation plays a different role. Time management, efficient...

Two thousand and twenty has been a transformative year in the lives of most people worldwide. This is no different for neurosurgeons. As a practicing neurosurgeon, academic department chair and chair of the Foundation for International Education in Neurological Surgery, I have found that the major issues of this year have touched every single aspect of what we do...

       

The COVID-19 national emergency declared in the United States on March 13, 2020, dramatically changed the role of telemedicine in clinical care, since shelter-in-place orders were issued throughout the country. As neurosurgical providers interact with patients in the operating room, intensive care unit, emergency department and outpatient clinics each day, they place themselves as well as their patients at...

The conversation is one that I have had many times. The surgery went well, we achieved our goals, what I saw in surgery, and what the pathologist found on the quick section confirms my suspicions; it is serious and bad news. The next steps will include chemotherapy and radiation, we will be on close watch going forward, we will...

It has now been six months since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The impact of this disease has been immense, but not unprecendented; our society has gone through previous pandemics, as was the case with the Spanish Flu. In the face of this immense challenge, many neurosurgical centers have resorted to creative measures to...

The Japanese government confirmed the first case of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the country on January 16, 2020, in a resident who had returned from Wuhan, China.1 This was the second confirmed COVID-19 case outside of China. Currently, the spread of COVID-19 has affected all clinicians in Japan. Over these six months, we, the Japanese neurosurgeons, have had to adjust...

“Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.” Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (1686)   The experience of our department during the initial pandemic response shared many of the features familiar to our colleagues across the western world — clinical...

Two thousand and twenty, for most of us, has been a year of uncertainty. As neurosurgeons, we are not unfamiliar with the ways in which a life can be disrupted. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the entire world to experience the disruption of life as we know it. The social unrest that followed in the United States was mirrored by...