Meet Gresham Richter ─ Professor, Academic Surgeon and Co-founder of CSurgeries
(Better known as “G” to his colleagues at CSurgeries).
Q: How did CSurgeries get started? How did you come up with idea?
A: CSurgeries was originally developed to be an educational surgical outlet that was video based- to teach trainees how to perform the surgeries or at least ask the appropriate questions during the procedure. It was going to be a CD-based system, but then we realized we wanted to expand the market, not just for residents, but for everyone…students, patients and other surgeons alike. We wanted to capture details for every field and do it on a grand scale, applicable to a bigger audience.
With this goal in mind, CSurgeries became a web-based venue. To encourage publication, we wanted to make this a win-win for the surgeons taking the time to produce the video. Our answer was simple. Our “aha” moment, so to speak was… the videos submitted by our colleagues must be a peer reviewed publication where credit is given and the videos are validated.
Q: What can you tell me about CSurgeries that’s not on the website?
A: It’s an amazing site! It’s the perfect opportunity for surgical educators and anyone else trying to learn about a particular surgery or technique. Surgical leaders from around the world are involved. There is so much activity already happening on CSurgeries.com. Patients, students, and expert surgeons are exploring the posted peer-reviewed cases.
Q: What makes CSurgeries unique?
A: We are unique in so many ways, but really it’s the people behind CSurgeries team that make us unique. We are an academic physician owned and operated organization. Our mission as is to teach and we understand how to value video content for publication. We have brought in education leaders in each specialty who are hands-on ─ participating, editing, and overseeing the videos produced and published on the site. It has become clear also that those submitting are interested in authoring videos to teach, not just to have something on the internet.
We understand that in the area of academic surgery, publication is critical. We allow surgeons, and their trainees, to get academic credit for their high quality and annotated videos of procedures; each of our videos is peer –reviewed and as a result we are being recognized as the premier site for validating their procedures with a publication. In fact, each video that gets approved get assigned its own DOI publication number. Companies like Research Gate already recognize our videos as a publication. Soon we head for PubMed and other Medline search engines…
Q: You are a surgeon. You are a teacher. You are an entrepreneur. Do you sleep?
Just enough. I have a very regimented schedule between family and work. Up early, home for dinner, kids to bed by 8pm and then I get right to work. Consistency helps. Family is critical. Thus sometimes I’m late to our late team conference calls!
Q: What advice would you give a medical student thinking about becoming a surgeon?
It’s a wonderful world and life…very rewarding. More importantly, learn as much as you can by observing and operating as much as possible.
Q: What would you be doing, career-wise, if you didn’t become surgeon?
I actually went to med school to become a psychiatrist but I realized that I was simply not patient enough. Honestly, I think I would be in the business world one way or another. Fortunately, now I have a mix of both. Like they say they in Arkansas, sometimes a blind squirrel finds a nut.
Q: Where do you see surgical education headed…let’s say in the next 10-15 years?
Streaming education and no more books. On-line interactive education with video and chat. In this sense, surgical education is going to follow internet advances.
Have a question you would like to ask Dr. Richter? Feel free to post a comment or send him an email at gresham.richter@csurgeries.com
