Dr. Jonathan Brisman is making a mark on the family business.
Brisman, a Great Neck-based neurosurgeon who counts two additional neurosurgeons, a radiologist and a dentist among his immediate family, was the only Nassau County doctor in his specialty listed in New York Magazine’s 2013 Best Doctors issue.
The selection, which is based on nominations from fellow doctors, was a major honor, Brisman said.
“I didn’t know that I had quite that many votes or that I would make it through their criteria,” Brisman said. “I remember even in medical school and my residency always looking at that list as the top surgeons in that area.”
“I was ecstatic,” he added. “I would say it was on my bucket list. I like to think it’s recognition of the hard work I’ve been doing.”
After 10 years in training and two fellowships, Brisman does that hard work at Neurological Surgery, P.C., a practice with offices on Northern Boulevard in Great Neck and in Lake Success run by his brother Michael, a fellow neurosurgeon.
And though sharing a specialty and a practice with an older brother may seem like a situation ripe for competition, that’s not what motivates him, Brisman said. Instead, he said, he and his brother followed in the footsteps of their father.
“It wasn’t sibling rivalry so much as we all kind of love my dad, and he’s like our hero. He seemed to really enjoy what he did,” Brisman said.
Brisman’s father Ronald is a reknowned neurosurgeon at Columbia University’s New York-Presbytarian Hospital, and his son looked up to his work from an early age.
“Ever since I was a little kid I always wanted to be a neurosurgeon,” Brisman said.
Brisman worked towards that goal at Harvard University and Columbia University, before taking fellowships and training at Mass General Hospital.
A 2006 article in the New England Journal of Medicine addressing changes in the treatment of brain aneurysms earned Brisman some attention in the medical world, he said.
”That kind of put me in the spotlight a little bit, at least nationally in terms of brain aneurysms,” Brisman said.
And now Brisman puts those new techniques into practice, treating life-threatening aneurysms with catheters in a procedure that is far less invasive that traditional surgery.
Cerebral aneurysms are often fatal, with 10 to 20 percent of patients dying before reaching a hospital and about half within a month of the aneurysms, Brisman said.
“They’ll come in with an explosive headache, sometimes they’ll be comatose,” he said.
Brisman treats those patients with a technique called endovascular coiling, where a catheter is threaded up the femoral artery to the brain and into the aneurysm. Prior to the development of that approach, developed during the 1990s, doctors had to open the skulls of patients to clip the aneurysm.
That stops the bleeding and prevents the aneurysm from rupturing again,” Brisman said. “That’s one thing I do that’s very gratifying – it’s a life saving maneuver.”
Brisman moved to Great Neck four years ago with his wife, and they now have three small children.
“It’s just a great place to raise kids,” Brisman said.
And while it may be early for his pre-schoolers to think about career paths, Brisman would not rule out his youngest from continuing in the family’s surgical tradition.
“I would say that he has very strong powerful hands. But there’s no pressure,” Brisman said.
