About half of the 1 million medical doctors in the United States are specialists. Sixty percent of them practice in the eight major areas of psychiatry, surgery, anesthesiology, emergency medicine, radiology, cardiology, oncology and endocrinology/diabetes, where the outcomes are somewhat predictable and quantifiable.
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About half of the 1 million medical doctors in the United States are specialists. Sixty percent of them practice in the eight major areas of psychiatry, surgery, anesthesiology, emergency medicine, radiology, cardiology, oncology and endocrinology/diabetes, where the outcomes are somewhat predictable and quantifiable.
The remaining 190,000 specialists are spread out over 13 other disciplines. Physical medicine and rehabilitation is among the newest and smallest specialties; and the number of medical doctors in that field, who concentrate on treating spinal cord injuries is even smaller still.
It is in this tiny subspecialty-of-a-specialty that you will find Dr. David Rosenblum, medical director of outpatient services and director of the Spinal Cord Program at Gaylord Specialty Healthcare in Wallingford.
“I personally know of only one other doctor in Connecticut that does this,” Rosenblum said. “It's not common.”
Rosenblum, in short, treats patients for whom there is usually no hope of recovery and restores them to some form of functionality. Moreover, he remains available to them for the rest of their lives, as he does with Cynthia Litsky, a young woman with multiple sclerosis who he continues to see, even though she is now confined to a nursing facility.
“David has every element that is so important in a physician in his attention to the patient and in helping out when there isn't a whole lot one can do for people with MS,” says Gloria Litsky, the girl's mother.
Rosenblum has even enabled patients who could not move from the chin down to return to work full time.
“Sometimes people, who experience such a catastrophic change in life, think that it's the end, a very reasonable assumption,” he says. “But with experience, skill and a change in perspective, it can be the start of a different way of life.”
What makes Rosenblum even more unique is that he zeroed in on his specific field of expertise back when he was a medical student about 30 years ago and, in what is a pattern in his life, he won't stop until he has achieved his goal exactly as he envisions it.
“I've always been drawn to challenges, so learning about something that wasn't common was natural for me,” he said.
His interest in medicine developed as a high school student growing up in Woodstock, N.Y., where Rosenblum accompanied his family physician on her rounds at Kingston Hospital. He even worked as an orderly for a while. He also played the flute; and as a result, he established two criteria for the college of his choice: excellent statistics for pre-medicine and a good music program, which, he soon learned, were also very uncommon. Rosenblum's standards were so demanding that he turned down an offer to attend Cornell University in favor of the State University of New York in Albany, where he became second chair in the school orchestra's flute section. He remains a member of the New Haven Chamber Orchestra to this day.
He was first exposed to rehabilitative medicine in medical school at SUNY Buffalo, where his original intention was to study neurology.
“I had no idea what a physiatrist was or even what rehab medicine was,” he said. “By the third year, I did a rotation in neurology and a rotation in rehab medicine, where I got to make a difference. I got to use my neurology, internal medicine and rehab med skills to help treat and guide people who needed to improve their functionality and quality of life . . . and I thought, 'How can I combine the two?' ”
Rosenblum got his opportunity at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, where he did his residency and which was well known for its spinal cord rehabilitative medicine program. In searching for his first permanent placement after residency, Rosenblum again insisted on finding a needle in a haystack, a boutique inpatient rehab center with expertise in spinal cord injury.
“Once I came to speak to the people at Gaylord, I was sold,” he said.
Married 30 years, Rosenblum and his wife, Marcia, live in Woodbridge. Their daughter, Rachel, 24, is an occupational therapist; and their son, Daniel, 26, is an attorney.
His biggest challenge, he says, is getting the health insurance industry to provide for the costly equipment and treatments that his patients need.
“When I started here at Gaylord, people would stay as inpatients for months. Now our average length of stay is 25 days . . . so we change what we do and how we do it to move with the times. But that's a challenge.”
