Neurology

The Department of Neurology is constituted by the clinical staffs at three hospitals: the Tufts Medical Center, St. Elizabeth's Medical Center and the Lahey Clinic Medical Center. There are 28 full-time staff actively participating in the teaching of medical students. In addition to teaching medical students, the department offers a very strong residency program which takes five adult and pediatric residents yearly for a three-year program.

Subspecialty interests are strongly represented within the department, including pediatric neurology, cerebrovascular disease, movement disorders, dementia and Alzheimer's disease, pain and headache, neuro-oncology, multiple sclerosis, neuro-ophthalmology, critical care neurology, neuromuscular diseases, behavioral and neuropsychotic disorders, sleep disorders and epilepsy. Staff members are involved in an alternative medicine center and actively integrate some of these techniques with clinical practice in headache and pain control. There are NIH-sponsored laboratories in Alzheimer's disease research and in AIDS-dementia within the department, and a strong liaison with the Department of Neuroscience.

The department has been particularly productive in the fields of neuropathy and neuromuscular disease, particularly as it relates to systemic diseases and in the quantitative measurement of neural muscle interaction in myasthenia gravis and Guillain-Barre syndrome, in the cellular biology of Alzheimer's disease, in the nature of dementia in AIDS patients, in the effects of vascular growth factor gene therapy on ischemic neuropathy, in drug trials for painful disorders of nerve, and in myelitis and other forms of myelopathy. All of these research initiatives are available to students.

In the pre-clinical years, the staff lecture on their areas of expertise in the neuroscience course. A neurology subinternship is offered to individuals interested in the clinical neurosciences.

During the clinical rotations, students are taught the basics of the neurological examination and introduced to the main categories of neurologic disease by actively examining patients, attending teaching rounds and preparing talks. Students rotate through the clinical services of each institution, participating daily in consultation rounds and ward service, as well as office practice.

In addition, a number of students spend their clinical neurology rotations with selected community neurologists who are allied with the department. Together, the wards and offices service an enormous variety of referred and community patients. In addition to hands-on training, a uniform set of case vignettes reflecting the breadth of neurologic disease is studied during the clinical rotation. These cases form the basis for a final examination for all students.