Clinical Exchange in Japan

My clinical clerkship in Nagoya University was impressive in every aspect. Thanks to staffs of Nagoya University and every Doctors I met, I had a great time learning so much during this period.

The chief of Neurosurgery Department, Prof. Wakabayashi, was very kind to me. On the first day, we talked about what part of Neurosurgery I was interested in and what I would like to learn during this period so that he could arrange a suitable learning schedule to me. I decided to spend most of my time observing operations. Certain types of operation was scheduled on each day. For example, cerebrovascular surgery was on Monday, functional brain surgery(deep brain stimulation for Parkinson disease) was on Tuesday, spine surgery was on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were for brain tumors. Especially, awake brain surgery was performed on every Friday, and that was something really surprising to me.

The operation room of Neurosurgery in Nagoya University was enormous, and equipped with so many advanced hi-tech machines. Some of those that really impressed me was the Brainlab system, which by using the patient’s MRI image, were capable to help localize where the operating site was in real time. Another unbelievable thing was that there was an MRI right in the operation room. Surgeons could check whether the brain tumor was totally removed or not by performing a intraoperative MRI and it only took 15 minutes.

During the operations, doctors sometimes offered me opportunities to scrub in which was so exciting. Wearing gowns, standing beside neurosurgeons and looking at the brain tissue through the microscope during an awake brain surgery was probably the best feeling ever.

Beside observing operations, I also participated in the morning ward round held by Prof. Wakabayashi, in which Prof. Wakabayashi would clearly explained and present the history of patients to students before approach them. In the evening, conferences were held regularly to evaluate the outcome of operations performed recently and plan how operations on the next week would be performed. With all these regular pre-operative evaluation and post-operative follow ups, I believe this is why Neurosurgery of Nagoya University was so outstanding. While enjoying every operations, I also didn’t miss Intravascular therapy, outpatient department and participating in speech given by Dr. Honmou from Sapporo Medical University which was about a prospective stem cell treatment for stroke and spinal cord injury .

In short, I was so grateful to be given such opportunity to participate in nearly every part in the field of Neurosurgery. This experience is inspiring, allows me to take a close look into the part of medicine that I am interested in and will definitely help me a lot in my future.