Will the REAL Dr. Dre, please stand up!

Doctor Dre

Team Sinai welcomes Dr. Arup De (pronounced "aw-roop dee"), anesthesiologist extraordinaire. He doesn't know it yet, but his official Team Sinai nom de guerre will be Dr. Dre (AKA Andre Romelle Young, the West Coast G-funk Rapper). Why not just plain "Dr. De"? Because that nick name is already taken by our very own Dr. Ron Delanois, universally known at Sinai Hospital as "Dr. D". Here in his own words, the real Dr. Dre stands up...

Doctor De and Friend

          I as born in India, grew up outside of Boston, and completed my undergraduate and medical education at the University of Massachusetts.  Next came residency in anesthesiology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.  After completion of my training, I worked in several different private practice hospitals in Massachusetts and Texas.  I decided to return to my academic roots, and so I currently work at the Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. My major goal is to establish a program in international anesthesia outreach for our senior anesthesia residents. Adventiste may turn out to be an ideal location for my residents to rotate through on an ongoing basis.

         My international experience to date includes three Operation Smile missions in India – one in Kolkata, and two in Guwahati.  My Bengali fluency came in handy in all three missions. Not sure how much Bengali will help me in Haiti, but I have been reviewing some  Kreyole phrases to get ready!

I'm also part of IMSuRT, the International Medical Surgical Response Team, which operates through NDMS (National Disaster Management System),  under the executive branch of the United States Government.  Through IMSuRT, I spent a frigid January week in Washington DC, during the Obama inauguration. Luckily, there were no disasters, other than a few frozen finger tips.

Professionally, I am keen on ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia. This has great promise as a practical tool in the developing world. Regional anesthesia is almost always safer than general inhalational anesthesia, though it can be trickier to perform regionals. Ultrasound guidance has the potential to make regional anesthesia the method of choice in the developing world, thus imparting a greater margin of safety for patients. I hope to share these skills with our Haitian anesthesiology colleagues next month at Adventiste Hospital.