Jennifer Smail, MD
Dr. Jennifer Smail talks about the excellent facility at Atrium Medical Center.
Watch her video.
I grew up in Wisconsin and started out doing engineering and worked in engineering for several years. And then we moved to Japan. I worked for a Japanese company doing engineering and we got transferred to Alabama after I had lived there for four years. And that was the time when I started thinking about going back to medical school so I went to the University of Alabama, Birmingham. And then we wanted to get a little closer to the family but we didn’t quite, quite get all the way back to Wisconsin so we landed in Cincinnati which is where I did my orthopedic residency and I subsequently did a fellowship down in Louisville, Kentucky but we kept the family here in Cincinnati. And when we were looking for where to end up finally after all those years of bouncing around, we wanted a little bit smaller community. We wanted to buy a farm and we wanted you know, kind of the moderate climate, nice, easy place to live and Middletown just fit the bill.
I joined up with Dr. Pledger who you know, you know, thoroughly researched his reputation in the community and everybody just loves him dearly and, and so that was an easy choice as well. And when I got to the hospital and I saw the facility that was kind of just the, to top it all off. I mean I love, I love all the availability of all the different specialties you know that, that you know that I need to work with when I’m taking care of the spine patients. You know the, all of the family practice guys and the internal medicine guys are readily available, great to work with. The hospitalist team is a very nice thing to have. Um, you know I’ve worked a lot with the oncology team, the neurology team and you know, and just every, every, every team that I would need to work with is here. And so I’ve never felt, I’ve never felt like I had to go elsewhere for that.
In general, the, a spine surgeon is going to see primarily degenerative stuff and so mostly you know, I’ll see people who are starting to have spinal stenosis, pain in their legs, pain in their backs and so there’s, that’s kind of your basic things. We also take care of anything from the cervical, thoracic all the way down to the pelvis. Seen a lot of complicated tumor cases, infection cases, deformity, you know scoliosis and kyphosis type things. And so really it runs the gamut. We’ve, we’ve done some pretty significant trauma here as well and really it’s run the whole gamut of spine.
I’ve had great support from the neurology teams, the hem-onc teams, the rehab teams. It’s, it’s all here, you know. And there’s the orthopedic group here in town as well for the non-spine issues.
I would recommend the Atrium Medical Center to anybody in medical school or residency who’s trying to decide where to go. I mean like I said before, all of the, all of the various teams are here. I think the quality of all the care at all levels has been very good. And the atmosphere is very collegial. I think one of the biggest advantages that I see here at the Atrium is the PT and the rehab is a very, very strong department.
I’ve also had a good experience with the technology availability here at the Atrium. The OR has been very accommodating. You know, I needed a few instruments when I got here and, and they got those for me, you know quickly and easily. Radiology is another important support specialty for me and they’ve got nice MRI scanners and I’ve been pleased with the quality of the imaging there and also interventional radiology has been a helpful department to have here as well.