You don't usually call a man "lucky" after he wipes out on a snowmobile, breaks bones, and has to be medevaced to the nearest trauma center.  You do, however, when you realize just how close he came to severing his spinal cord.  Dr. Michael G. Kaiser from the Spine Center was this man's surgeon...

Snowboarder  and Olympic hopeful Danny Davis was recently released from a Utah hospital after surgery to fix a broken vertebra.  According to the New York Times, he would have been one of four members of the US halfpipe team.  But that dream ended after he crashed an all-terrain vehicle last...

Amazingly, surgeons can take bone from one part of the body and place it in another and it will grow there.  Bone is one of the only tissues in our body that can regenerate in this way.  If you break your leg, for example, not only will the break heal but extra bone grows in. This is called a...

H. Houston Merritt, MD is widely considered the father of Neurology, by now however, it may be more accurate to say he is the Grandfather of Neurology.  In the 12th edition of Merritt's Neurology just published, the editors refer to the most recent bunch of contributors as his "intellectual...

Take this quiz to find out. 1. Would your mother tell you to sit up straight if she saw you working on your laptop? 2. Do you communicate with your friends from your laptop more than in real life? 3. Do your neck and shoulders ache? 4. Do you find time disappears when you are on your...

"Ardi" (short for Ardipithecus ramidus) is a fossil of one of our earliest pre-human ancestors. Most likely female, she lived 4.4 million years ago. Over the last several years a team of researchers has studied her remains and finally presented their findings to the world via Science Magazine...

Just as you can't know a person just by their photo, surgeons can't make clinical decisions based solely on X-Ray or MRI images.  Whether the images look good or bad, they have to consider the whole person. This is especially true when it comes to a degenerative disorder involving the spinal cord...

Like a lot of smart people, neurosurgeons know that it is important to keep learning. The Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) Meeting is a week-long event where neurosurgeons from around the world get together to teach and learn from each other. Many of the doctors from the different Centers...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Neurological Institute (NI). The Institute was founded in 1909 as the first hospital in the U.S. dedicated exclusively to the study and treatment of Neurological disorders. This anniversary inspires us to look back and see how far the field has come. A...

The Los Angeles Dodgers reported that their pitcher Hiroki Kuroda is back on the roster after being benched for a neck injury. A couple of months ago he was running in the outfield when he was struck down by what Kuroda called “pain I’ve never felt before.” He was taken out of the game and...