By Lois Thomson
Michael McDermott, M.D., was recently named the most published author of papers on meningioma research in a study titled, “Bibliometric Analysis of Meningiomas from 2001 to 2023: Focus on the Top 100 Most Cited Papers.” However, in speaking about the honor – and other portions of his career – Dr. McDermott simply said, “I don’t like to self-promote.” When being introduced at a speaking engagement, he often just says, “I’m a neurosurgeon at Baptist Health in South Florida.”
While that is true, there is so much more to the story. Dr. McDermott is the chief medical executive of Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute, having come to South Florida in 2020 after spending 30 years at the University of California San Francisco – 28 on faculty and two years as a fellow. He said that in 1997 he decided to focus on meningioma (the most common primary brain tumor in adults), in both a clinical and a research effort. While at UCSF, he also held two different endowed chairs, both of which were focused on meningioma research, and allowed him to invite other experts to San Francisco to lecture.
Dr. McDermott mentioned others with whom he was closely associated who were a significant part of his work, so as he pointed out, “(Authoring articles) wasn’t a solo effort of one individual; it took a team, and the team was surgeon, surgical nurse, residents, radiation oncologists, neuro-oncologists, neuro-radiologists, neuro-pathologists – putting everything together and trying to look at different questions and answer them with either clinical reviews or basic science research.” He explained that he was often the one to come up with the questions that needed to be asked, and he had the clinical experience to be able to write a series “on every cranial location for meningioma in the course of my career there.”
Dr. McDermott said he tried to be very honest about the results in his reportings because some surgeons have a tendency to advocate for surgery as the only form of treatment, inferring that “it’s always a piece of cake,” but he noted “that wasn’t true at all. So I published papers specifically on complications in surgery for different types of meningioma locations.”
Dr. McDermott emphasized that being the author of hundreds of papers was not one of the goals of his career. “No, I was just having fun – exploratory fun, trying to answer questions I didn’t know the answers to. When I couldn’t find the answers, I’d say, hey why don’t we do this. So we did, and we discovered something new.”
He attributed ideas for other articles to “accumulating experience from more than 2,000 cases, and also with the experience of coming up with little tricks of the trade – techniques I would use that I’d think would help get the surgery done quicker, safer.” Additionally, he said very often the residents’ critical thinking drove him to seek answers to questions about particular issues.
In describing why he came to Baptist Health after 30 years in San Francisco, Dr. McDermott said, “I had gone as far as I was going to go at UCSF in my career, and I saw an opportunity to develop something in South Florida that would give me a challenge, so I decided to take it on.”
One of the opportunities he realized was the cancer institute, about which he said “they had almost every radio surgical device that was available.” When he arrived, he discovered that many Caribbean and Central and South America countries, even wealthy ones, didn’t have radiosurgery programs. His idea was to set up such programs there to care for patients, rather than obliging people to come to the United States.
Dr. McDermott came to Baptist Health when he was 62, saying he “didn’t want to retire.” He’s in charge of neurosurgery and neurology, physical medicine, and rehabilitation and neuropsychiatry, and it’s an exciting time for him. “I come to work thinking I know what my day is going to be like, but most of the time it doesn’t turn out that way – which is one of the reasons why it remains interesting and exciting.” And while the articles on meningioma are an important part of Dr. McDermott’s work, the clinical effort is equally vital. “We do good things for people, and in the vast majority of cases, when we operate, the patient has a good outcome – so we improve their situation from what they were pre-op, and that is the goal.”
For more information, call (786) 527-9545 or visit www.baptisthealth.net.
