My name is Dave Ruch, and I am the chief
of hand surgery at Duke University.
What inspired me to become a physician
is my grandfather's a doctor,
my dad's a doctor, my grandmother's
a nurse, and my mother's a doctor.
So, there was no option in my family
about what I was Is gonna do.
When I was a kid,
I watched M*A*S*H on television and
I wanted to be Hawkeye Pierce.
Probably the biggest satisfaction that
I get in my career is taking a very
severely injured person,
someone who had their arm amputated,
someone who had their arm crushed by
a steamroller, out the window of a car.
And taking that patient from
the night of the emergency room,
where I put the blood
vessels back together and
the nerves back together and
come back later and reconstruct the bones.
And then come back later and
put new muscles and new tendons in.
And at the end of it they
can go back to doing,
functioning in a classic type of scenario.
Duke University has been the strongest
hand surgery program in the country for
the last 50 to 75 years and
it continues to be the premier fellowship
program in the country for hand surgery.
We teach academic people how to be
the best hand surgeons in the world.
So if you're going to come
to see a hand surgeon,
wouldn't you come to where we
teach the best and the brightest?
Favorite part of my job is seeing
patients, yeah, I mean I love my patients.
They come in, they've got any
number of given complaints and
just a chance to get to know them and
talk to them and
feel like I've helped them,
leads you to go home a happy person.
