Dental News - Dr. Daniel Alam will offer keynote at AO’s 2015 annual meeting

Dental Tribune USA

Mon. 9 March 2015

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NEW YORK, N.Y., USA: In the instant the blood drained from the donor face, Daniel Alam, MD, endured the most humbling moment of his career. The first facial transplant recipient in the U.S. had unquestionable confidence in him and the other doctors. Suddenly, unpredictably, Alam confronted doubts. “The face appeared so lifeless that I was forced to wonder if it could really come back,” he recalled.

Later, he sewed its blood vessels to the patient’s and watched the stunning revitalization. It was among the many teaching moments Alam experienced as part of a multidisciplinary team that would reconstruct a physical identity for a woman who had lost the majority of her face to a gunshot wound.

As the primary microvascular surgeon of the first face transplant case, he joined others in the effort — specialists and experts from plastic surgery, head and neck surgery, transplantation surgery, anesthesia, psychiatry, psychology, bioethics, nursing, social work, dentistry, ophthalmology, pharmacy and infectious diseases. Their goal was to successfully perform a near total face transplant for a patient who had exhausted all conventional means of reconstruction. Their goal was to enable a person to feel normal again, to proceed with hope despite all potential complications. The goal was to relieve patient suffering.

As keynote speaker for the Academy of Osseointegration’s 30th anniversary annual meeting, Alam will reveal what he discovered as a member of that team — lessons very different from those he expected. Participants will be able to identify the similarities to his experiences in their own professional life. The AO meeting will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone West Convention Center from March 12 to 14.

“The clinical and social challenges in a problem like this can seem insurmountable from the perspective of a single care giver, and absolutely would’ve been without the complex crossover skills of multiple providers and varied expertise,” Alam said. “It is a collective of thought and an evolution of ideas that moved this forward. Teamwork and collaboration are indispensable for a project like this.”

Alam plans to use the experience to illustrate how health care providers learn, both actively and passively, as part of a team solving complex problems. He’ll also convey elucidating lessons learned about caring for people.

“No matter what the procedure, before going under anesthesia, every patient has enormous faith in their health care provider,” Alam said. “They all feel they have the best care giver in the world and that’s why they chose you. That level of trust is as inherent in people whether it’s a dental extraction or tonsillectomy as it was something as life altering as it was for our transplant recipient.”

It’s a trust that can weigh quite heavily.

“Sometimes the surgical requirements are far beyond the capacity of what any provider can do in isolation and it’s reassuring to know you can rely on the foundation built by the team,” Alam said. “When you take a step back you see the critically important part is improving someone’s life.”

“The Power of Collaboration and the Team Approach” will be held from 1 to 5:15 p.m. at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Daniel Alam, MD, FACS, is currently a professor of surgery at the University of Hawaii, and his practice involves complex head and neck cancer and reconstructive surgery at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. He was the primary microvascular surgeon of the first face transplant procedure in the U.S. while at the Cleveland Clinic, where he served as the Section Head of Facial Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery in the Head and Neck Institute.

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