Week 3 Brandon

I have started spending more time observing other surgeons, especially those outside of spine care. I was able to sit in on a few endoscopic cases where they went in to relieve pressure in a part of the brain. A "brainlab" machine was used in a ventriculostomy case in order to locate and plot the path of the dremel tool so as to minimize the damage to the tissue. I also saw the decompression of cerebral tissue (chiari decompression) which seemed to be very similar to what is done to decompress the spine (laminectomy/foraminotomy). Venturing outside of the box is allowing me to learn new things about other parts of the body as well as draw some parallels in rationale and design between procedures. Tuesday and Wednesday were both clinic days, we saw a large amount of patients. Some of the patients were follow-up and some new with very interesting cases. I am getting better at reading the films and am having more in-depth conversations with Dr. Hartl. He gave me an assignment to look into "cracking joints" which came directly from patient interaction; the resulting literature search has been more than interesting since there seems to be a few different theories, one of which being highly based on fluid dynamics (brings me back to my mechanical engineering roots). I am looking forward to jumping into the research projects for the summer. It seems like we will be able to collaborate with a few people on the intradiscal pressure project and will have the mri/x-ray films for the validation study very soon. Next week should be interesting.