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When world-renowned neurosurgeon Philip Stieg, PhD, MD, was recruited to establish the Department of Neurological Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine in 2000, he viewed the new department as a diamond in the rough — a place where he could make his mark.
The appointment was an opportunity to rethink resident training and establish new professional standards. “I wanted
the residency program to be rigorous, meaning that I believe that becoming a neurosurgeon is a little bit like
becoming a Navy SEAL,” he says. “What we do is hard. But you also have to be human.”
To help meld the concepts of expertise and humanity, Dr. Stieg established seven pillars that would infuse and
ultimately define the department's operation both clinically and culturally: integrity, collegiality, compassion,
perseverance, leadership, scientific curiosity, and technical superiority.“
I felt that I had to give everybody some principles by which they knew I stood strongly and would be unwilling
to violate,” Dr. Stieg says. “Not everybody's going to achieve great things in every one of these, but these are the
core competencies that everybody in our group has to have.”
The seven core principles are now embedded in the department's DNA and have expanded beyond the institution's
walls.“The thing that I'm most proud of is emphasizing the importance of emotional IQ,” says Dr. Stieg. “That was
nonexistent in the development of neurosurgery. When I started, a compassionate neurosurgeon was a rare breed.”
Yet that combination of excellence and empathy in the field is paramount for the patient. “Every day, we're
going into somebody's brain or their spine, which carries the risk of altering the quality of their life, if not their
existence,” says Dr. Stieg. “You would have to be in human not to feel some level of anxiety or trepidation. There's
this sense of awe and respect that one has to have.”
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A Legacy of Leadership
Merging surgical rigor with more humanistic qualities has been a successful strategy for Dr.Stieg,
Neurosurgeon-in-Chief of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine and theMargaret and Robert J. Hariri Professor of
Neurological Surgery and Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives at Weill Cornell Medical College. “In my 22 years
here, we've trained dozens of residents, the vast majority of whom have gone on to prestigious academic positions
around the country,” he says. “Our graduates are leading the way into the future of neurosurgery.”
But transforming neurosurgical resident education is not the only groundbreaking accomplishment of Dr. Stieg's
storied career. He has also developed new approaches to patient care. He expanded the concept of a neurosurgery
department into the Weill Cornell MedicineBrain and Spine Center, an interdisciplinary clinic that brings together
neurosurgeons, endocrinologists, neuropsychologists, neuro-oncologists and other specialists to care for patients with
complex needs.
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Empowering Patients
Dr. Stieg is as passionate about educating patients and counteracting medical misinformation as he is in educating
fellow physicians and advancing emerging technologies. “There's a considerable amount of bad information out there,”
he says. “If you talk to doctors, they will tell you that the first 10 minutes of their patient contact is disavowing
the misinformation that they've gotten.”Dr. Stieg created and hosted the NPR radio show “How to Save Your Life,” to
help stem that tide and in 2019 started the popular podcast “This Is Your Brain With Dr. Phil Stieg,” which explores a
wide range of topics related to brain and mind. He also hosts a condition-focused webinar series by the same name,
racking up thousands of views on YouTube. “The focus of the webinar is to educate patients and teach them how to be
better patients,” he says. “I believe every patient needs to ask ‘What do I have? What does it mean to have it? What
can I do about it? And what are the risks?'
“We're trying to educate people about what they should know about different diseases and problems,” says Dr.
Stieg. “But I also try to get them to focus on what they can do to avoid those disease states. So much of disease is
behavioral.”For instance, Alzheimer's doesn't begin in older age, Dr. Stieg says. “It's a process that starts when
you're 30 and there are things that you probably can do to avoid or delay the onset of the disease,” he says.He takes
an even broader view of brain health and function in the podcast. “Almost everything is under the purview of the
brain,” he says. He covers topics including sexual delight and dysfunction, sleep and dream states, how the brain
processes and responds to music, and event he sources of rage.In addition to thought pieces for the podcast, Dr. Stieg
has interviewed experts in nutritional psychiatry and sleep disorders, just two of the areas where lifestyle
approaches can make a substantial difference in a patient's health. He sometimes “prescribes” particular podcasts to
help patients understand what is happening to them and the role they have to play in their own healing.
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But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give
you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the
master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but
because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor
again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because
occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial
example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has
any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who
avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?