Anand Veeravagu, MD, was recently profiled in Stanford Health Care's MedStaff Spotlight. Dr. Veeravagu is an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Director of Minimally Invasive Neurospine Surgery at Stanford Medicine. 

Why did you choose to work at Stanford?

Stanford is a very special place for me, personally. I started here as a medical student. Even though I am young in my career, I have been at Stanford for nearly 20 years now. Initially, the reason I chose to come to Stanford for medical school was because the education program clearly focused on developing physician-scientists who are striving to impact the future of medicine. At Stanford, that innovation from bench to bedside, in combination with clinical practice, results in care for patients that we couldn’t even fathom a few years ago. It was clear to me that Stanford values innovation and efficacy in science and healthcare. It has been true since the day I arrived as a medical student and in every decision point I made since then: where to go for residency, where to complete my fellowship, and where to start my career. The intellectual direction of Stanford Medicine very much lines with what I hope to contribute to science and patients over the length of my career.

How did you become interested in neurosurgery, your specialty?

As a medical student I rotated on every specialty to understand where I could make an impact. My training was in biomedical and electrical engineering as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. Those very closely mimic the nervous system. Throughout medical school I realized that the technological advances made in microchips In Silicon Valley enables new treatments for patients that suffer from neurological conditions. That’s a movement I wanted to be a part of. Looking ahead, this means that what we can do for patients will change every year I’m in practice. Deep brain stimulation, robotic spine surgery, molecular imaging of pain – it has been an exponential integration of technology into neuroscience and more importantly, for patient care.

Have you treated patients whose cases especially stand out? What was memorable about them?

Throughout our career as neurosurgeons, we will always be humbled by what the nervous system is capable of and how it can recover. When you begin as a faculty member, it is the first time that the patient’s care and outcome is exclusively your responsibility. I still remember one of my first surgical patients. There was a young man who had a severe ATV accident. He had a spinal fracture that required immediate reconstruction and stabilization and a very severe spinal cord injury, ASIA B, with sensory and motor deficits in both of his legs. Deep down, I did not expect that he would ever walk again. But, lo and behold, a year and a half later, he walked into my clinic to show me how much neurologic function he had recovered. I had talked to him about this immediately after his accident. I said, “the truth is, we don’t know how much you will recover. You will recover some. But the full potential of recovery is very hard to predict.” He told me that the fact that I didn’t tell him that he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life gave him the hope to work extraordinarily hard in rehabilitation. This brought his function back to something that was useful, meaningful, and allowed him to live life. There are ways to clearly communicate the expectations of the injury and the prognosis with a patient, but at the same time not take away hope. I will certainly tell them accurately what I think their prognosis is, but I will not snatch away their hope to get better. Sometimes that's what patients need to get through the really difficult times. Hope really does have profound impacts on their recovery.

What is your biggest challenge?

I think the greatest challenge is, for me, knowing that throughout the entirety of my career I will probably never know everything I want to know about the central nervous system, about neurologic recovery, and about prognosis. I certainly will have tremendous experience. But it’s humbling to know that I will be learning every day of my life, for the rest of my life. The premise is that you never stop and that is a real challenge for me. It is unlikely there will be a point in my life where I will say I know how to do everything perfectly, every time. We’re trained to have a healthy respect for the power of healing and the ability for things to not go as planned, for several reasons. Every day I walk into the operating room prepared for the surgery to go perfectly. I’m also deeply respectful that at any point in time, things could change.

What’s next for your career?

I want to dig deeper into my role as a mentor and a surgeon. Training the next generation of surgeons is very important to me. I try to achieve these goals not only through my clinical practice and as assistant professor, but with national neurosurgery leadership opportunities. Throughout my career I always want to maintain a substantial clinical practice. I also want to apply leadership skills I developed during my time working in Washington DC and contribute to Stanford’s success for patients and the community. What do you enjoy outside of work? My wife and I have two little boys so we spend a lot of time doing whatever it is they like to do. They're 5 and 3. We spend a lot of time outdoors and we spend a lot of time traveling. They enjoy both of those things and my wife and I do as well. So that’s what we spend a lot of our time doing. It brings great joy to me to just be there with them, no matter what we are doing.