Nationally Recognized Spine Care

Many people end up in jobs that suit them just okay. Not Rami Said, D.P.T. His work as a physical therapist fits him like a surgical glove. Ask anyone: His academic background as an engineer combines with his personality to make the clinics and classrooms of Columbia an outstanding fit for him.

It’s tempting to trace Dr. Said’s specialty in the complex structure of human joints back to the jigsaw puzzles of his preschool years. He liked to turn the pieces upside-down, so there was no picture, to make solving the puzzle more challenging. His mother found him doing this when he was just 4 years old.

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“I used to run 50K races—then I couldn’t walk 200 feet,” says Tommy Javenes, who estimates that he was functioning at maybe 3 or 4 percent of his previous physical capacity when he first met neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Kaiser, Associate Director of The Spine Hospital at the Neurological Institute of New York.

Just two months earlier, Tommy had been an avid hiker and skier in peak physical condition. Then, one summer night, he took a fall while descending Anthony’s Nose, a mountain in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley. The fall injured his neck, spinal cord and nerve roots (nerves that exit the spinal cord to branch out to the rest of the body).

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