Meet Dr. Manas Nigam, as he discusses his areas of focus, path to medicine, what brought him to Sentara, approach to patient care, and how the field of Plastic Surgery is evolving.
Hi, my name is Manni Nga. I am a plastic and reconstructive surgeon specializing in hand and peripheral nerve surgery. I take care of patients all over the Hampton Roads area. I see patients in my clinic at, for Norfolk and I operate out of Norfolk General Hospital, we hospital and Princess Anne Hospital. So I, I am trained primarily as a plastic surgeon but then decided to get my fellowship training and hand surgery. So I did my residency at Georgetown School of Medicine in Washington DC and then my hand fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine actually with the orthopedic department in Houston, Texas. So my passion is functional reconstruction of patients. And so I primarily focus on hand, but I take care of functional problems all over the body and especially in the peripheral nerve as that's our way, our gate way of knowing what's happening in the outside world and sometimes that can get perturbed a little bit, especially with things like carpal tunnel syndrome. So I like taking care of even what might seem like the smallest problem to um even some of the largest problems that especially our trauma patients often face in this area. My path of medicine was an interesting one. So I, um when I was a kid, I thought I was gonna be a scientist. And I remember a picture I drew myself in the lab. And then uh when I was a little bit older, I thought I was gonna be in finance and potentially my, my college degree was in finance. And I went to the University of Virginia where I studied um economics as well. Um, but then I got a little tired of looking at spreadsheets. Um and, um, realized that I love taking care of patients in my role as an EMT on the college campus. So then I went to medical school at the University of Chicago and I was deciding between geriatrics and pediatric surgery. And I ended up going to plastic surgery because both there's a robust field of knowledge that you need. But there's some creativity because you really, you tailor the solution to each patient to figure out what the right solution is. Um But, and while I was a residency, I decided to do hand surgery. And the cool and funny thing about what I do now is I take care of patients of all ages, pediatric, to retired folks. So in the end, I did get to do a little bit of both. So I remember visiting Sana, um when I interviewed here after my fellowship and I was impressed with many things, I was impressed with the diversity of the Hampton Roads area. There's a huge military population here and there's just, there's also a need for reconstruction. Um, it's a good system. It cares for its providers and it cares even more so for its patients here. I've been happy because I've been able to take care of patients in the way that I think is best and it allows the providers the freedom to be able to express sort of their, um, their inner physician selves that brought them into the medicines, the joy of medicine so that we can worry about the patient. And I don't have to worry about, you know, I don't have to worry about payment factors in, in a patient. I don't, I don't have to think about any of that stuff. I focus truly on what's best for the patient and their long term outcome. Arthur and the patient starts way before we even see you, even before you've had your appointment. We have a team of people. Uh, we have a P A, we have an ma we have excellent front desk staff that make sure we understand what your problem is to make sure that we direct you to the right spot and we get everybody in as soon as we can so that we can take care of your needs as soon as we can. We start from the ground up. We wanna understand who you are and we don't separate, you know, we don't separate your, you know, a body part from who you are. You're not just, you're not just, uh, you know, a hand or a wound or a reconstructive problem. We say, who are you? What, what do you have going on in your life? Um Who, you know, who's your family, who do you live at home with? What do you, what do you do for a living? What do you like to do for fun? Those are the first questions we ask and then we say, ok, so then this thing that you have going on that you came to see us for, how is this affecting all those things that you care about? It's a really a really exciting time to be in the practice of medicine, but I always temper that a little bit too with, ok, what's tried and true because you know, there may be some new device but you wanna make sure that you're using in the safest way and that will last you hopefully for the rest of your life, right? The exciting things that are coming down the pipeline though, I think are focused on the right areas, which is how can we help you recover quickly? How can we reduce your pain and your stress after surgery? And how can we um how can we to use technology to help us do that as far as plastic surgery goes? And I'm interested in for full nerve surgery. We're really uncovering a lot of pathology that we didn't know about before. So I'll use an example of carpal tunnel. The median nerve is what's being compressed in your wrist. All nerves start right in that in the spinal cord and they travel down to get to wherever they're going, the gut, the feet, the hands, and there are many different points at which a nerve takes its twists and turns, that could cause pathology. So these sort of carpal tunnels exist all over the body. We're just understanding more and more of that. We have intraoperative devices that we can use to stimulate nerves as we're looking at them to help restore function, we can now do nerve transfers to transfer from something that wasn't from, that is working to something that wasn't working. We can now use technology, there's advanced prosthetics out there that um can locate a signal in a different part of your body and use that to power and reanimate another part of your body. And so that's just in the field of peripheral nerves when it comes to ligament reconstruction in the hands. Um or arthritis surgery, we have new technologies that allow us to support our reconstruction so that we can get you moving faster, back to sports factors, faster, back to work faster. Um That's, that's just uh that's just another example there. Um And um I mean, on and on it goes, we joke in plastic surgery that a lot of um fields end up taking some of the innovations that we have for good measure because I think expanded access is great and that forces us to keep on our toes so we can keep innovating.
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