From time to time on Neurosurgery Blog, you will see us cross-posting or linking to items from other places when we believe they are relevant to our readership. Today’s post originally appeared on FOX 5 Atlanta on May 26, 2021. In the video segment, Franklin Lin, MD, FAANS, a neurosurgeon at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital in Atlanta, Ga., and his wife decided it would be safest for him to move out of his home and into a hotel at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read More
For much of 2020, as COVID-19 case surges threatened to overwhelm the U.S. health system, physicians faced onerous, business-as-usual insurer policies on top of a public health emergency. Read More
The COVID-19 public health crisis upended many norms in medical education. Most of medical school is built around significant in-person contact. During COVID-19, educators and students have had to adapt to the changing times to protect public health. Perhaps the most strongly affected individuals are those who applied for the 2021 match. Students and program directors alike were in an unprecedented time — trying to find the right resident “fit” without away rotations and in-person 
interviews. As an applicant to neurosurgery, I was looking forward to learning how different programs operate compared to my home institution while also furthering my education in my field of interest. While COVID-19 significantly affected this plan, the pandemic also allowed for changes and innovations to the neurosurgery match — some of which may persist beyond the 2021 match cycle. Read More
Last year, the entire world was forced to face the COVID-19 pandemic head on. And now, we — the American people — have the opportunity to achieve peace of mind and live life as free as before by choosing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Concerned for the health and safety of our nation, I recently joined some of my fellow colleagues in Congress — each of us are also health care professionals — in a public service announcement encouraging Americans to get vaccinated. Very soon we will have more COVID-19 vaccines than we have people willing to take it. In fact, almost half of adults in my home state of Kansas are uncertain about getting vaccinated. Read More
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many changes in the neurosurgery residency application process. Early decisions by the Society of Neurological Surgeons led to the canceling of away rotations, installation of virtual interviews, and a required eight-week home rotation in lieu of visiting rotations. Despite being disappointed that I would be unable to visit programs physically, the neurosurgical response to the challenges as a result of COVID-19 was very proactive, and it was a relief to have a definitive idea of the process early on. Read More
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the neurosurgery community to utilize new technologies to create and maintain connections. With social distancing guidelines in place, much attention has turned 
to the virtual space to accomplish this. At the University of Miami, we have trialed several virtual initiatives to connect with the neurosurgery community across the country and the world — from medical students interested in our residency training program to attending neurosurgeons interested in hearing from the world-leading experts in various neurosurgical subspecialties. We report the lessons we have learned during these unprecedented and challenging times. Read More
The year 2020 required constant adaptation to a rapidly changing environment in many facets of life. Few would have guessed that national travel would be severely restricted or that surgeons would be wearing face masks to the supermarket. As impactful as the COVID-19 pandemic has been on life in general, the effect on the neurosurgical practice has been similarly profound — from shifting outpatient care towards a more remote, telehealth presence to restricting non-urgent surgical case volume. Perhaps the most significant, potentially long-lasting effect of the pandemic on the neurosurgical profession has been with the transition from medical student to resident physician. Read More
From time to time on Neurosurgery Blog, you will see us cross-posting or linking to items from other places when we believe they hit the mark on an issue. Today’s post originally appeared in The American Spectator on April 1, 2021. In the op-ed, Richard Menger, MD, MPA, assistant professor of neurosurgery and political science at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Ala. and Anthony M. DiGiorgio, DO, MHA, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of California San Francisco in San Francisco, Calif. highlight the opportunity for overlapping surgery to assist with the backlog of neurosurgical cases due to COVID-19. Read More
From time to time on Neurosurgery Blog, you will see us cross-posting or linking to items from other sources that we believe are relevant to our audience. We wanted to bring attention to this article from the Winter 2021 issue of Congress Quarterly titled “Considerations for Private Practice Groups in the Age of COVID.” Stacey Lang, an executive administrator at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a volunteer with the Neurosurgery Executives’ Resource Value & Education Society, outlines both short-term and long-term considerations for practice restructuring in the COVID-19 era, including staffing, facility and scheduling matters. Read More
“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
The economic, medical, political and psychological tsunami unleashed by the COVID-19 virus is unlike anything we have seen in our lifetime. The traumatic disruption of 9-11 was limited in comparison to our current crisis. While impossible to include up to the minute statistics, already more than 15 million cases have been confirmed with at least 620,000 deaths, and U.S. unemployment is approximately 11%. Is it possible that any good will come of these months of tragedy and lock-down? What do we know about the immediate and longer-term consequences on us as humans, on the health care community and neurosurgery? I have been given the monumental task of trying to peer into that future as the Neurosurgery Blog’s focus on COVID-19 draws to a close. Read More