Neurointerventional services
Photos by Pete Stone
Cross-training is a nifty little term. It refers to the act of combining techniques from one activity with techniques from a different activity to achieve a broader range of skills. Employees get cross-trained on different aspects of a job. People talk about cross-training their brains to enhance creativity. You might even own cross-training athletic shoes. Not many established physicians cross-train, but it’s exactly what Todd Kuether, M.D., did.
After finishing his residency in neurosurgery, Dr. Kuether signed on for in-depth training in a field that would seemingly cast aside the surgical skills he’d spent years perfecting. He enrolled in a fellowship of neurointerventional techniques to study nonsurgical ways of resolving brain and spinal conditions.
Ask him what attracted him to this field, and Dr. Kuether will marvel that he ever entered neurosurgery at all.
"During my residency, I had no intention of going into neurosurgery. I wanted to go into orthopedics. There were no rotations available in ortho at that time, so I took a rotation in neurosurgery. I loved the difficulty of it and the technology involved."