Now in its 13th year, the Orthopaedic Spine Service at MGH, under the direction of Dr. Kirkham B. Wood, is responsible for all aspects of spine care, teaching and research. This past year we were pleased to welcome Dr. Thomas Cha as the newest member of the Service. Dr. Cha completed his orthopaedic training at Columbia University and a clinical spine fellowship in Chicago at the famed Rush-Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Cha’s interests include the degenerative lumbar and cervical spines as well as medical economics and spine surgery. Our service also includes Drs. Brian Grottkau, Chief of Pediatric Surgery, Joseph Schwab, and Physiatrists James Sarni, Leonid Shinchuk and David Binder. Drs. James Rathmell and Christopher Gilligan are both pain specialists who work with the Pain Center here and provide a full breadth of services to our patients.

We are currently developing a comprehensive MGH Orthopaedic Spine Center. Our goal is to create a center that will be able to care for every aspect of a patient’s spinal condition: from surgery to physiatry, medicine, geriatric treatments, pharmacology, physical therapy, radiology, orthotics, chiropractic, acupuncture, alternative medicines and patient education in both non-operative as well as operative settings.

The Harvard Combined Spine Fellowship has three fellows, two of whom rotate at MGH and the third at BWH. The fellows are actively involved in teaching and research programs in addition to their clinical duties. Over the last year, the Spine fellowship has authored papers in the Journal of Biomechanics, Spine, Journal of Spine Disorders, European Spine Journal, the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and a number of textbook chapters.

This past year the Spine Service also hosted two Spine surgeons from overseas to conduct a year’s sabbatical at MGH: Dr. Avraam Ploumis from Thessaloniki, Greece, and Dr. Jae-Hyuk Shin from Seoul, Korea.

Drs. Wood and Guoan Li and Shaobai Wang, PhD, continue to actively collaborate in the area of Spine Kinematics. Dr. Wood is using a dual fluoroscopic kinematics system to better study the motion of the cervical and lumbar spine, specifically as it applies to motion preservation and surgical treatments. The implication of this work is to provide kinematic data for our orthopaedic spine surgeons in fields such as disc replacement and fusion surgery.

The database that was begun four years ago with Dr. Henrik Malchau has been reconfigured with the help of the Red Cap system at Harvard. All patients now provide information upon arrival in the form of patient-related outcome instruments with which we are able to follow and evaluate their condition over time. The database is now quite robust with over 1,200 surgical procedures logged.