Address
15 Valley Drive, 2nd Floor, Greenwich, CT 06831Phone
203-785-2807 Contact“I am part of a community and I very much care about the long-term outcomes of my patients. That is why I approach my patients the way you might approach a friend or a relative.”
Dr. Strugar’s areas of neurosurgical expertise are comprehensive and his thirty years of experience extends to intracranial and spine tumors, cervical and lumbar spine disorders and spine and brain injuries. Fellowship-trained in skull base surgery, Dr. Strugar has profound insight into complex neurosurgical challenges. He has a prodigious experience in the surgical treatment of the spine, having performed thousands of both maximally and minimally invasive procedures.
Dr. Strugar has published and presented on a wide range of topics, including brain tumors, spine tumors, acute spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury. A caring, dedicated and respected neurosurgeon, he is also highly experienced and sought after as a diagnostician and as an independent expert medical evaluator. He has been selected as “Connecticut Magazine’s Best Doctors” for six years in a row.
I should start with a disclaimer: I am an optimist when it comes to the present and future trajectory of medicine. My optimism takes shelter on a mountain of medical innovations that are prolonging life, reducing disability and controlling pain. As a Neurosurgeon I must treat disease that by its very nature is retrospective: you look to past medical history, past injuries, established habits and traits to arrive at a proper diagnosis. The treatments prescribed must be focused, accurate, proven and safe. To this latter point I always refer to one of my Yale professor’s admonition: “Always stay two fads back”. This is especially pertinent to cutting age technologies. To differentiate those that are leaps forward vs. a dangerous fad requires experience, and after thirty years of doing this, I know the problems and thus can generally recognize a true solution. To practice Neurosurgery at present requires keeping what works and persisting at introducing innovation. To insure maximal safety, I found it useful to take the attitude that all patients are a relation, a relative if you will. Not too close of a relative, as that would paralyze decision making, but close enough that it is no longer a job. You really want them to do well, and not to get hurt, and that is the best balance. This is where the optimism starts taking over.
Just at the time when the credulous start becoming skeptical, I have turned from skeptical to optimist. This is based on facts, data, and the deft and elegance of the accelerating medical advances. It is reasonable to contemplate that the current high school graduating classes will have more than half their alumni present at their centennial celebrations of the future. To get there, physicians must manage in the present both disease and healthy living. Much has been made of healthy living, but for me this is data driven, scientific based preventive medicine. It is crafting todays treatments and surgery in a larger life plan, expecting my patients will live longer than the current actuarial predictions allow. If we are going to live past one hundred, the question all healthy people must as themselves is: how must we optimize our physiology at 40, 60 and 80 years of age along the way. This is particularly germane if surgery is introduced in the mix. Surgery must be viewed, from this vantage, as a way to arrest the immediate disease, and simultaneously whenever possible, to enhance the Neuro-muscular system for the long run. This short term/long term dichotomy must be adjudicated for each case. This approach is hardly anachronistic, indeed it is the foundation of my approach to each patient.
Board-Certified: American Board of Neurological Surgery
Fellowship: Skull Base Surgery, George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, DC
Residency: Neurosurgery, Yale-New Haven Hospital, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT;
Research Fellow: Angiogenesis & Brain Edema Research Laboratory, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Internship: Surgery, Yale-New Haven Hospital, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
MD: New York University, New York, NY
Leadership Positions: Chief of Spine and Skull-Base Surgery, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, CT; Chief of Neurosurgery, Waterbury Hospital, Waterbury, CT
Associate Clinical Professor: Neurosurgery, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Hospital Staff: Greenwich Hospital, CT
Member: Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS), CNS Educational Committee, CNS International Committee, American Medical Association, Connecticut State Neurosurgical Society, Connecticut Medical Society, North American Spine Society, Romanian Medical Society
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