Whenever possible, Michael R. Hausman, MD, takes a moment to catch up with some of the surgeons he trained through the Mount Sinai Hand Fellowship. Some, he proudly notes, have established their own fellowship programs. Others have several publications to their names.
These check-ins provide Dr. Hausman, the Chief of the Hand and Upper Extremity Surgery for the Mount Sinai Health System, an opportunity to gauge his impact as an educator.
“It’s exciting to see how each individual has taken what they have learned here to contribute to the field,” says Dr. Hausman, the Dr. Robert K. Lippmann Professor of Orthopaedics and Vice Chair, Department of Orthopedics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “They are the kind of achievements that make you justifiably proud.”
That sense of pride is almost paternal. To date, roughly 80 fellows have learned the nuances and intricacies of hand surgery under Dr. Hausman’s tutelage. The quality of the training they received is evident in their successes, in the hundreds of patients they have treated, and in their own efforts to prepare a new generation of hand surgeons to advance the frontiers of care. His dedication and impact as a teacher were recognized in September when Dr. Hausman was awarded the A. Lee Osterman Excellence in Education Award at the annual meeting of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand (ASSH) meeting held in Minneapolis. The award honors an ASSH member who has dedicated their career to the advancement of hand education.
“I do not do what I do seeking recognition,” Dr. Hausman says. “But if I am to be recognized, it means something to me for it to be related to education, and for it to happen sui generis from the people that I’ve educated.”
In educating others, Dr. Hausman has drawn on the pedagogies of the mentors he encountered over the course of his training. These include the late pioneering hand surgeon J. William Littler, MD, who founded the C.V. Starr Hand Surgery Service (now the C.V. Starr Hand and Upper Extremity Center) at St. Luke’s−Roosevelt Hospital Center before the hospital was integrated into Mount Sinai in 2013; and the late Richard G. Eaton, MD, a renowned hand surgeon who also practiced at the Center. Dr. Hausman has also emphasized the value of self-discovery among his trainees, in particular, the opportunity to contend with the real possibility of failure in an unsupervised context. He explored this topic at the ASSH meeting during an instructional course he organized and delivered, titled “The Spaces in Between.”
“I think it is very difficult to progress as a surgeon without at least skirting that possibility and, hopefully, not experiencing that very often,” he says. “It was my brushes with failure and the mentors who were in proximity to me that catalyzed me and enabled me to meet expectations.”
Dr. Hausman examines a patient’s finger range of motion after tendon reconstruction.
Dr. Hausman measures the patient’s nerve function by testing the sensitivity to being touched with one or two points of the testing instrument.
Dr. Hausman explains forearm muscle function to the patient.
Dr. Hausman explains the structures stabilizing the elbow joint and permitting a wide range of motion prior to ligament repair.
A Career Defined by Innovating New Treatments
For Dr. Hausman, the freedom to explore, to investigate the structural elements of challenges, was fundamental to success. Over the course of his career, he pioneered the use of arthroscopy for treating pediatric elbow deformities and adult fractures and dislocations, subsequently teaching the procedure through international courses. Under the motto “Not better … Normal,” he also developed new treatments for conditions involving the wrist and reconstruction of injured peripheral nerves and common conditions, including tennis elbow. These treatments reconstruct living tissue from the patient’s own body, with the goal of restoring them to full comfort and function for life. Dr. Hausman continues to innovate through his investigation of the potential for laser diffraction technology to facilitate nondestructive evaluation of nerves and the development of treatment plans.
In sharing these discoveries, technologies, and techniques with a new generation of trainees, Dr. Hausman aims to make diagnosis and treatment easier for them. But his interactions with trainees have been equally edifying for him. “They are in the operating room with me every day, so their feedback and their input are critical to the whole process,” he says. “Even hearing from alumni and what they are doing inspires me to change the way I do what I do based on this collective wisdom.”
Recognition from his former students and peers has not prompted any major plans for Dr. Hausman. While he is open to writing a book that would synthesize his knowledge, his priority remains training a new generation in the fundamentals imparted by his mentors—and enhanced with his extensive expertise.
“I think the ability to abstract knowledge and techniques from a wide variety of specialities and reconfigure them in new ways to address problems that do not have good solutions is vital,” he says. “I will continue to do that through my daily contact and work with students, residents, and fellows.”
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Michael R. Hausman, MD
Professor of Orthopedic Surgery