Motion Preservation, Spine Innovation, and Nutrition Informed Recovery with Dr. Franco Vigna
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Carly Beam with the Becker Spine and Orthopedics Podcast. And I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Franco Vigna. Dr. Vigna, thank you for joining us.
Oh, thank you for having me.
So before we dive into some questions, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your work and background?
sure so i am an orthopedic spinal surgeon so i have a little bit of an unusual background coming into medicine um funny i graduated college and after i graduated college i went into finance actually i went into really Yeah, I went into financial planning. I went into working with people and setting up retirements and savings and goals. I had a Series 7 license to trade stocks. I had an insurance license.
What inspired Dr. Franco Vigna to pursue a career in medicine?
And I kind of realized as I was doing that, one of the things that attracted me to it is I really liked – the personal connection to people. I liked helping people and I liked helping people achieve their goals or achieve their dreams. And I liked it, but I always felt a little bit limited because there wasn't as much of a personal connection as I was looking for when I was in the financial industry. And it's kind of funny. My father was a physician and he was an anesthesiologist. And, you know, I grew up and we'd go to church and we'd go out to the store and people would pull my dad over in the store and they would give him a big hug. And they'd say, Dr. Vina, you took such good care of my mother or my child.
And they just they had this great connection to him. And I realized I said to myself at the time, I said, I want that. I want that connection. And I wasn't experiencing it where I was working. So I decided I wanted to go to medical school.
And so... How old were you when you decided to go to med school, if I can ask?
Oh, my gosh. I was about 25. So I'd been out of college for a few years, right? And so I had to go back. I did some post-baccalaureate pre-medical courses. And I actually I got my EMT. So I worked as an EMT during that time as well, because I wanted to test this theory that medicine is what I wanted. I had to test this idea of a personal connection, this idea that this is where I wanted to spend my life. And I loved it. And I said, you know what, this is for me. So that is actually how I kind of came into medicine. And along that time, you know, my dad had had a few health problems. It really kind of connected me to what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. And so that was kind of my transition to medical school.
So I went down to New Orleans. I went to Tulane University Medical School and I got my master's in public health simultaneously with my MD and, you know, came out and decided orthopedics was what I wanted to do. Right. It just... I like to fix things, right? I like to make people feel better, right? I like to see a problem, fix it and look at an x-ray or something and say, wow, that looks great. So I went into orthopedics and throughout that time, like disc replacement was just starting out. Like we were doing these, you know, SV Charité lumbar disc replacements were just starting. It was becoming a really exciting time in spine. And I had a couple really good spine mentors. Andrew Barola and Tom Hare were in New York as part of my program.
And I really liked the guys. I liked the work we were doing. I liked working in the biomechanics lab. And so... I decided to go into spinal surgery because I thought it was kind of where the kind of the cool stuff was happening and where I could really make a big difference in making people feel better. And yeah, so so I did my fellowship with Paul McAfee at the Maryland Spinal Reconstructive Surgery Fellowship. And we did some great work in biomechanics with Brian Cunningham in the lab and Anton Dmitriev in the lab. And we were involved in disc replacements and biologic studies, biomechanical studies. And that really is what... really made my career interesting and really take off. And even though I'm a private practitioner, I'll still do, I've still been involved in FDA studies.
I like to design implants.
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