Rory Murphy, M.D.
Neurosurgeon
Question: How did you become interested in this disease or condition or area?
Answer: I’ve always been fascinated by helping people move. As a teenager, I used to help and volunteer trying to help people with spina bifida, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries in a physical therapy office. And I was always fascinated by how we could improve people’s function so as then I was interested to know, “how do I do that in the future?” So, I looked at different occupations like physical therapy, engineering and medicine. And then I thought medicine was probably a better fit for me with the strengths I had and my personality. So, I then looked at orthopedics, neurology and neurosurgery and neurosurgery seemed to be the one that really caught my eye and made me excited.
Q: Please highlight your most important research advance or advances:
A: Here in Arizona, especially at HonorHealth Deer Valley, we have worked hard over the past six to seven years to help people quickly with a spinal cord injury. We’ve gone out and educated people on injury prevention, educated first responders and firefighter crews, paramedics, helicopter crews on how to help a person and recognize a person who’s had a spinal cord injury. And when they do have a spinal cord injury, what treatments and options they must help them initially and then educate them on the very importance of time. The earlier we can take the pressure off a spinal cord injury, oftentimes it leads to better outcomes.
When somebody has a spinal cord injury and they can get to the hospital quickly, we have one of the things I’m most proud about, which is that we can get a patient from initial assessment into the ER, quickly screened in the ER with their CT stabilized, to an MRI scanner, straight from the MRI scanner into the operating room, all within an hour. From there, we can decompress the spinal cord quickly. There’s more and more evidence showing that the quicker you can take the pressure off the spinal cord, the better people can do.
Once we decompress the spinal cord, once you take the pressure off the spinal cord, we then have several ways to help keep the blood pressure up, optimizing blood pressure. We have excellent ICU care and excellent rehab care, but one of the things I’m really excited about is our ability to be part of the University of Miami for a spinal cord injury trial where we’re looking at cooling people after a spinal cord injury that could potentially stop or reduce the damage that’s happening to the spinal cord and maybe help them get better outcomes afterwards.
Q: What research would you like to conduct in the future; what remains an unmet need for patients?
A: The overall goal is to help people who have difficulties moving because of damage to their nervous system and that, in some instances, could be from an acute spinal cord injury or it could be from a slower onset spinal cord injury. A lot of the work I do and a lot of areas we are really making good progresses is helping people with problems with their neck or their spine and the various ways to take the pressure off the spinal cord and take the pressure off the nerves and help people who have problems with the compression of the nerves or in the neck that’s causing problems.
Q: Why is it important to encourage younger individuals from diverse backgrounds to pursue this research; and what advice would you give them?
A: I think get out there and get into the community, see the challenges that people are facing. And when you see the problems, you’ll be motivated to find solutions. That’s where the research comes in. We must improve our care. We must do better for our family and community. When you see the challenges, you’re going to look, you’re going to be motivated to try and improve and fix them and you’re going to learn more about them. Research is the quantified or is a way to quantify the problem and improve the problem.
