Welcome everyone to the BECCA Healthcare Podcast Series.
I'm Joya Mohammed, writer and moderator of BECCA
Healthcare. My folks I have with me today,
doctor Dean Bercioi, orthopedic surgeon at Summers with
a deep seated surgery and sports medicine.
Doctor, welcome to the podcast. We're very excited
to have him join us today. Please let
us start. Would you mind taking some of
your questions about
your background?
Yes. Thanks for having me. As you, mentioned,
I just started,
my practice here in New York, Silmers Orthopedics.
And I spent time
in residency here in New York at Northwell
at Hofstra,
where I did an orthopedic
residency and then did a fellowship at Texas
Back Institute in Dallas, Plano. So I have
some northeast and then some southern techniques, and
I'm trying to incorporate that in my practice
here in New York.
So what are some of the biggest headwinds
you're planning for this year?
So this year, and what I'm trying to
bring to my practice as it continues to
grow now that I'm in my 2nd year,
post fellowship
is not only disc arthroplasty,
but spinal endoscopy.
And the latter, I think, is a fairly,
you know, novel technique
that hasn't really
become
a portion of most spine surgeons'
techniques just yet.
At least in Western culture, it is something
that they've been doing more so in Europe
and in Asia, especially in Korea and Japan.
But for lumbar disc herniation specifically,
that's
a novel technique through an endoscope, which has
a 7 millimeter port.
And then these patients have much quicker
recoveries, in addition to you as a surgeon
being able to visualize
at the disc level of the pathology.
So it's a great
technique, and it's something that I foresee myself
further incorporating in my practice. And I'm, the
first one at my hospital
that's doing this and one of only a
handful of surgeons in the region that's doing
it.
How will the spine and orthopedic field evolve
in the next 2 to 3 years, do
you think? Whether it's involving tech or the
workforce or anything like that.
Over the next 2 to 3 years, I'd
say, not only are procedures going to be
more commonly performed in an outpatient setting, such
as an ambulatory
care setting.
Not only the 23 hour stay, but probably
even shorter. And I think endoscopy
opens up that ability to
essentially
be treated almost like a knee arthroscopy, where
you get your surgery, and within an hour
or 2, you're discharged home. And that's
a big
benefit of endoscopy, where you have not only
small incisions from a minimally invasive point of
view, but you have no dead space in
terms of
the dissection.
Everything
closes up as you take the small tube
out. And it's even smaller than the tubular
retractors that are 18
to 22 millimeters that you hear in micro
discectomy. This is truly
minimally invasive.
And again, having a camera down at the
level
of the pathology as opposed to looking at
it from a normal standard
surgical perspective, which is looking down onto the
patient,
we could really deal with
the the problem at hand and then get
people back to their lives and to work
significantly quicker.
Thank you so much for sharing that. And,
doctor, before I let you go, the last
thing I really wanted to ask you is,
where do you see the best opportunities for
growth?
There's a lot of growth that's happening
in not only techniques, like I was talking
about with endoscopy,
but in implant sciences in the form of
arthroplasty,
which I also do, cervical dis replacement, and
lumbar dis replacement. These are motion preserving
procedures, as opposed to fusions, which
obviously limit the motion at that segment.
And when you understand biomechanically
the anatomical segment, the cervical or the lumbar
spine,
it makes sense that if you can preserve
motion,
you should. And we saw this sort of
change with
hip and knee surgeries
earlier on.
Obviously,
when we didn't have the capabilities to do
arthroplasty for those joints, we did fusions. And
of course, now if you ask a hip
or a knee surgeon
to do a fusion, they look at you
kind of crazy. Right? And your surgeon wouldn't
offer you that. So it's the same concept
with cervical lumbar.
We're getting better
knowledge of the biomechanics. And where I trained
at Texas Back,
we had 20 plus years
of surgery in the form of arthroplasty.
So I think that's a big thing. And
then, of course, robotics.
And I've done a lot of training with
a number of robotic systems. And I think
that adds
another
benefit
to having more accurate
instrumentation,
as well as having
another,
you know, reliable source of
information on that patient
in regards to coordinating not only
MRI and
CT scan specifically, but maybe trying to merge
that with MRIs and other
visualization
technologies that have come about, such as Augmedix
or that mixed reality.
Yeah. Yeah. That completely makes a lot of
sense. Thank you so much for sharing,
those things, and thank you for those final
thoughts. It's definitely been very informative discussion. So,
again, I wanna thank you so much for
coming on Becker's HealthCare,
and I hope you have a great time.
I look forward to connect connecting with you
again soon. Alright. Thank you. Thanks for having
me.