On Topic Video Transcript: Orthopaedic Spine Surgery

William F. Donaldson III, MD

Our practice involves seeing patients with all kinds of spinal disorders including problems with the neck, the low back and the midback and this can be from ruptured disks or slipped disks, arthritic conditions, severe spine fractures as we are a major trauma center to just a small disk herniation. But we also see infections and tumors.

Our practice’s philosophy is to have a very personal relationship and involvement with our patients. We may do their surgery but we also want to know how they’re doing before surgery, after surgery and further down the line to make sure that they have the best possible result. Many times we will personally call them at home and see them to make sure that their care is what we want and their outcome is what we want.

Team Approach

The patients that we see are involved in a multidisciplinary approach. That includes our medical assistants, our nurses, our physician’s assistants, our residents, out top-ranked fellowship program, and our award winning surgeons. As a result, we feel very proud that we have patients that refer other patients in, other doctors that refer patients into us and also just being with UPMC allows us to have such a referral base.

Internationally-Recognized Surgeons and Research

Our spine program not only has very skilled surgeons that do over a 1000 cases a year we also have an internationally recognized research program that looks at the diseases that our patients get and through gene therapy to possibly repair disks and through the biomechanics to understand what happens to the spine we hopefully can impart that on future care of our patients. Because the surgery we do and the research we do is not nearly as important as how well our patients do in the long run.