Top Doctors Spotlight: Treating Patient Care Like an Art
BIDMC's Dr. Martina Stippler Among Region's Top Doctors
When Dr. Martina Stippler, a neurosurgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), first learned about the brain in high school, she was captivated.
“The brain is the seat of our personhood,” she said. “But there’s so much we don’t know yet. I wanted to be part of this journey because there is so much to discover.”
She went on to study medicine at the University of Innsbruck, near her childhood home in Austria. Then, breaking from the typical path her colleagues were taking, she accepted a post-graduate training position in Philadelphia. There, she was immediately taken by the cutting-edge research and surgery that she witnessed and soon decided to defer her plans to return to Austria for residency training.
“What was going on here was remarkable, truly amazing innovation” she said. “I wanted to be part of it, to learn all I could.”
Through hard work, timing, and some good luck, Stippler was offered a seven-year residency position at the University of Pittsburgh, which remains among the nation’s top neurosurgical training programs. She then spent several years as the Director of Neurotrauma at the University of New Mexico, the state’s only teaching hospital and Level One trauma center, where she gained experience by performing thousands of complex cases at this high-volume center.
Twelve years ago she made her way to Boston, where she found a clinical home at BIDMC. Here, she continues to provide trauma care, but has a busy elective spinal surgery practice. In 2014, she founded the hospital’s anterior pituitary tumor clinic, where she operates on patients with pituitary tumors using minimally invasive endoscopic techniques.
Dr. Stippler is now Vice Chief of neurosurgery at BIDMC and the Director of Neurotrauma. This year, she was elected as the President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, among the specialty’s most prestigious professional bodies. She was also recently named one of Boston Magazine’s Top Doctors, an annual recognition showcasing the physicians who go above and beyond to deliver exceptional patient care. She considers this a particular honor, since it reflects the opinions of her fellow doctors across Boston.
“We work very hard to give the best care to patients,” she said. “There’s a thousand little things you need to do to create good patient outcomes.”
The Top Doctors award means that fellow physicians – who know all too well the quiet sacrifices and extra miles the best of them go to deliver great care – saw that she consistently did the right thing even when no one was looking.
As Dr. Stippler tells it, BIDMC allowed her to tap into a network of hardworking, collegial and intensely patient-focused colleagues. She particularly values the team-oriented spirit of BIDMC. Everyone-- colleagues, collaborators and partners-- share in a mission to deliver the best possible care to every patient who walks through their doors.
“Everyone just wants to do right by patients,” she said. That means taking on last-minute requests, being quick to offer second opinions, and treating patient care as something bigger than work. “It’s really an art form because it’s not something you read in a book,” she said. “It’s a mixture of experience and lifelong learning that helps you to make the correct diagnosis and perform the perfect surgery to help your patients and get them back to their lives.
“If I can take all that and say, ‘I’m here for you’ and then get them through this, that is very, very rewarding.”
