Adolfo Cotter,MD

I find this combination of specialties fascinating.

In my opinion, Neurology has been, and still is in large part a diagnostic specialty, whereas the main goal of medicine is to resolve patients clinical problems. Hopefully with more R&D, neurological treatment will become more useful. Unfortunately, up until now where the practice of Neurology has been used to affect clinical outcomes, practitioners and patients are often hampered by unacceptable medication adverse event profiles to achieve symptomatic relief, and outright cures are seldom achieved. This is why Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology R&D in this area is crucial and is thankfully now moving forward faster than ever before.

In the meantime, combining neurological knowledge and diagnosis with a discipline such as legal medicine for example would allow physicians in this field to be more useful to their patients. In this context, neurologists who otherwise are not surgeons would be able to diagnose illnesses and use their legal tools to help patients better. For example, what about using their expertise to help patients get insurance benefits or resolve medico-legal or medical malpractice issues? Ideally this could be combined with the practice of Neurology itself.

Adolfo Cotter, MD

Aug 03/2011