President's Address

ASSFN President’s Message update, 2008

President’s Message: State of the specialty

Under the leadership of Mike Schulder, Andres Lozano, Emad Eskandar, and Chris Honey, the recent ASSFN meeting in Vancouver was the most successful yet of this society. Stepping back from the details of the presentations, the meeting underscored the variety and intellectual vigor of the disciplines that inform functional neurosurgery. We are blessed to be working in an extraordinary time in our subspecialty. Translation between neuroscience and clinical practice is accelerating in both directions: from laboratory to operating room, and then back again as the results of our surgeries, and the neural signals we record, inform new theories of brain function.

Many specialties have had their “golden age.” A golden age is a period when a critical mass of individuals, enjoying a favorable economic and political climate, adopt a set of principals that result in a leap forward in human understanding. That of surgery as a whole began in the late 19th century, with the introduction of asepsis, anesthesia, and the X-ray. Common, lifesaving surgeries such as appendectomy were born in that era. Philosophy and political theory have also known specific times of great advance. During the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Holland was home to the first free printing presses of Western civilization. In the resulting flourishing of philosophical inquiry, Spinoza (The Ethics, 1677) argued against the prevailing mind-body dualism, laying the philosophical foundation for a “material” cause of the mind. One consequence of that philosophy was in evidence at ASSFN 2008, a session of which highlighted device-mediated electrical linkages between the reasoning and emotional sides of our minds.

Although a new board of directors and new officers were elected in Vancouver, any member of the ASSFN can get involved in the society. Contributions to this newsletter or to the ASSFN website may be sent to the newsletter editor, Emad Eskandar, or to the webmaster, Paul Larson. On the website, we are beginning a new clinical trials section, with information and a sampling of standardized forms that may be of use to clinicians working to document results of some of the more under-investigated neuromodulation procedures. Suggestions for seminar topics at our CNS and AANS section meetings may be sent to any of the officers, or to Aviva Abosch or Mike Kaplitt, the CNS/AANS program committee chairs. It is no surprise that functional neurosurgery is increasingly attractive to the most curious minds of medicine, and we wish the ASSFN to be their forum.

Philip Starr