Education Is Key

United Spinal played a pivotal role in improving the education of physicians in the field of spinal cord injury medicine.

By Terry Moakley

Much of what United Spinal does is education. Our Web site, publications, and brochures are all developed to give you the information needed to make it through another day successfully, and maybe more easily.

A single achievement in our history, however, stands out and gives us hope. It is our involvement in the 1990s to have Spinal Cord Injury Medicine officially accepted as a subspecialty of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

Dr. Joel A. DeLisa, professor and chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at UMDNJ Medical School, and a past president of the American Paraplegia Society (APS) noted in a 2004 issue of The Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine that APS “played an essential role” in this accomplishment but “the support of Jim Peters was key to our success.” This is true, but it didn’t happen overnight.

Recognition of a Subspecialty

Back in 1954, the founders of APS approached the American Medical Association to gauge the level of support for a new specialty known as spinal cord injury (SCI) medicine, but it was deemed too early in the evolution of SCI care to think about it. Fast forward to 1977 when our association helped APS to be incorporated and Jim Peters became their executive director as well as ours. In 1978, many of those same SCI pioneers helped to form the American Board of Spinal Cord Injury, but just two years later they decided to temporarily abandon their quest until they could generate more support from organized medicine.

Jim Peters, Dr. DeLisa, and others got together in 1993 to develop an examination in SCI medicine and submit it to the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (ABPMR) to become this certifying board’s first subspecialty. By lowering their goal- from becoming a new specialty to seeking a subspecialty in an existing field of medicine-they achieved their objective. SCI medicine was accepted as an ABPMR subspecialty in 1995.

Since 1998, either through successful completion of a three year fellowship in SCI medicine, or passage of the previously mentioned examination in SCI medicine, approximately 600 of our nation’s physicians have been certified in SCI medicine. Our involvement in this type of educational advance keeps a lot of people moving forward every day.

Terry Moakley, director of Special Projects, is United Spinal’s official historian.