Inside This Issue
Another Kind of Marathon Less than halfway through the 2010 New York City Marathon, Lauren Kent began oticing little blind spots in her right eye—the first sign that she was having a stroke, apparently prompted by the strap of her handmade shoulder bag, which caused a total occlusion of her ight carotid artery. page 1
It Takes a Department To help bridge the gulf between impressive advances made in biomedical science and disproportionately modest gains in our nation’s overall health, NYU School of Medicine has created a new Department of Population Health, designed to provide a hub for research and training. page 3
A Tale of Two Tumors Of the 3,000 pediatric brain tumors diagnosed each year in North America, fewer than 150 are craniopharyngiomas. Removing one is considered one of the most daunting challenges in all of neurosurgery. The surgeon cannot know precisely what he’s up against until he’s inside the brain. page 3
Listening between the Lines More than 30
different languages are spoken by patients at Tisch Hospital.
When they need an interpreter, the Office of Language,
Cultural, and Disability Services provides one for face-to-
face conversation or by telephone during an emergency or
when a language is less common. page 7
news & views is published bimonthly for
NYU Langone Medical Center by the Office of
Communications and Public Affairs. Readers are
invited to submit letters to the editor, comments,
and story ideas to thomas.ranieri@nyumc.org.
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Martin Lipton, Esq., Chairman, Board of Trustees
John Sexton, President
Robert Berne, PhD, Executive Vice President for Health
NYU LANGONE MEDICAL CENTER
Kenneth G. Langone, Chairman, Board of Trustees
Robert I. Grossman, MD, Dean and CEO
Deborah Loeb Bohren, Vice President,
Communications and Public Affairs
Marjorie Shaffer, Director of Publications
news & views
Thomas A. Ranieri, Editor
Marjorie Shaffer, Science Editor
i2i Group, Design
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Copyright © 2012 New York University.
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The Man Who
Reinvents the Wheels
With purpose in each step, Longino Ortiz makes his morning rounds among
patients at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation
Medicine. Back in his office, a small room near the entrance of Rusk’s Horizon
House, Gino, as he’s known, doesn’t have to worry about dictating patient
histories or keying information into a computer. He doesn’t even have a computer.
What Gino does have is wheelchairs—lots of them—and plenty of tools and
extra parts to fix them. He is responsible for cleaning, servicing, and adjusting
more than 100 wheelchairs used by Rusk’s inpatients. A seat adjustment for a short
person, say, or a leg extension for a tall one, will usually do the trick. “For me, it’s all
about the patients,” says Gino. “If they have an armrest that’s
too low, for example, or if they feel any discomfort, I’ll get beeped
and be up in their room in no time flat to fix it.”
Gino’s mindset was honed during 41 years as a physical therapy
aide at Rusk, where he helped patients walk, exercise, and swim. Mechanically
inclined, he also did some repairs of wheelchairs, which made him a natural fit for
his current job. Gino lost no time taping a photo of Dr. Howard Rusk to the wall of
his workroom. “It was beautiful to watch him visiting and encouraging patients,”
he says of the institute’s founder. The lesson clearly took.