Comanche County Memorial Hospital recently welcomed a new neurosurgeon to their team who is passionate about using the latest technology to help him be as precise as he can be in the operating room.
Dr. Christopher Neumann said he was working at a hospital as a secretary when he met a neurosurgeon and got to see his first brain surgery. He then started going to school at night and eventually got into medical school and watched as many neurosurgeons operate as he could.
After graduating med school in 2007, he was an attending for higher level trauma in Florida before going to Ohio for 10 years.
Now that he’s in Oklahoma, Dr. Neumann is using technology to help him be as precise as he can be.
“All of the technology that’s available, I want to use here,” he said. “So, navigation, there’s a microscope that we use. We do nerve testing during the surgery. I want to do the case the way I would want to have it done on me.”
He said it helps him be precise to the millimeter on where he wants the screw to go.
“It helps me tremendously,” Dr. Neumann said. “I can’t see through the bone. I can’t see beside the bone. I can’t see where the bony channel is, but with this navigation, I can see where I need to start, the direction of where the screw, drilling, and tapping of the channel need to happen.”
The system also lets them choose different size screws to see the best possible hardware to use on the patient’s spine.
“This would be where I would want to start the screw and then drill the bone, and there’s another instrument which is a tap which also has these references on it, and then we can tap the bone and place the screw,” he said.
Dr. Neumann said there are several reasons why spine surgery is needed. He said it’s vitally important for thoracic spine injuries because the bony channels are very small.
“You don’t have a margin of error,” he said. “You have to be right on the money to get that screw where it needs to go. The other thing is that there’s no spinal cord in the lower part of the spine. It’s a bunch of nerve roots, whereas in the thoracic spine, it’s a bunch of spinal cord, and you can’t move that, and it’s not very forgiving.”
Dr. Neumann also sees patients because of degenerative disease, arthritic changes, and degenerative disk disease, which causes a lot of pain, and he helps relieve the pressure off of the nerves and stabilize the spine.
“The third instance would be something where it’s also a degenerative process, but bones are slipping one against the other, and that’s sliding down, and one bone or the other is causing narrowing pain, and that has to be stabilized,” he said.
While Dr. Neumann wants to help people get out of pain, he said he makes sure his patients have explored other options before resorting to surgery.
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