Meet Dr. Howie Levinson, as he discusses his areas of focus, his path to medicine, what brought him to Sentara, his patient centric approach, and how the field of Plastic Surgery is evolving.
My name is Howie Levinson. I'm a plastic and reconstructive surgeon and I work for a Centra Medical Group, um, the chief of plastic surgery at EV MS, um, the former president of the American Society of Plastic Surgery and Plastic Surgery Foundation, which is the largest plastic surgery society in the world. I'm a surgeon scientist with more than $10 million in NIH funding. I have more than a dozen patents and I lecture nationally and internationally on reconstructive uh microsurgery and, and care of patients. So I'm a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who performs both cosmetic surgery and reconstructive microsurgery. Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a physician. Um, actually a surgeon. I always liked the idea of being able to help people with my hands to solve complicated problems and to sort of have immediate fixes. Um, and sort of the pressure that comes with surgery always sounded super interesting to me. And then as I started learning more about surgical disciplines, um, plastic surgery was just 100% for me. Just the creativity of plastic surgery, the multitude of problems you can solve. Um the different solutions. One can apply. Uh and just the impact uh you have is just really wonderful um locally, globally, um simple problems to incredibly complex problems. Yeah. So I was at Duke for 18 years and just this opportunity arose. It's a wonderful opportunity. Um This used to be the pre eminent plastic surgery program uh in the United States. And then it just sort of had um sort of dissolved, so to speak. So the opportunity arose to come back up here and bring some of that expertise, uh plastic surgery uh to the community to rebuild the plastic surgery program um to work with younger colleagues um and just and and improve care uh in this area of the country. So the thing is patient centric for sure. What does the patient need? What does the patient want? Good communication, good understanding, good listening is really important and also good care with a referring provider being on the same page about what the plans are having good discussion um so that we can solve the problem and manage the patient uh in the best way possible. I think those are the two key aspects, good patient care and good communication with your referring provider. You're really your partner or your colleague. Plastic surgery is probably the most innovative field in surgery, if not medicine. Um We just are very creative and the field moves very quickly compared to colleagues. Um Some of the newer sort of hot topics, so to speak. Are things like uh uh breast reconstruction where you go direct to implant after mastectomy, um putting uh implants on top of the chest wall, uh pre pectoral using uh Xen Gras or animal tissue around that to hold things in place. That's a very or or surgical mesh. That's a hot topic. Um Another hot topic, which is an invention of mine is in abdominal wall reconstruction. It's soft tissue fixation. So it's creating a new mesh that basically overcomes hernia recurrence. So about one third of people get a ventral hernia repair will have a recurrence. And that's because of the, the devices we have in the operating room are just insufficient. Uh suture, cheese wires through tissue and glues and T and screws and things like that just don't have the anchoring strength. And so several years ago, I invented a mesh with superior anchoring technology. It's based on things that go on in nature. It's like the roots of a tree or a snowshoe that distribute force um or vine around a tree. And so basically designed a mesh like that patented it, uh get it FDA approved and it's being used around the United States uh currently and that really the one or two year data now shows uh single digit to 0% hernia recurrence rate with it. So there are one or two year data looks very good that uh it may achieve that goal
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