Illustration by Michael Austin; theispot.com
Doctor in a rainbow
See the full list of 2023 Rising Stars.
Finding More Effective Ways to Cure Disease
Amanda Jean Noska, MD, MPH
Infectious disease specialist, Hennepin Healthcare
Amanda Jean Noska, MD, MPH
Why did you choose your field? I thought I wanted to be a family doctor. As I went through training, I felt that the knowledge base required to be a family physician wasn’t my strongest skill set, and I wanted to be able to follow things down the rabbit hole. I also ended up really loving every infectious disease doctor I ever worked with.
It’s a wonderful career because you end up hearing people’s stories and getting to know them, and I get to be their primary care doctor—when they’re living with HIV or we’re curing hepatitis C—and feel like a safe space for a patient. It’s a lovely opportunity. To me, it’s a sacred relationship. And I feel like the advocacy opportunities are endless in this career.
What is your favorite thing about being an infectious disease doctor? I’ve worn a lot of hats over the years. My favorite things—my niche areas—are vulnerable populations: people who are incarcerated, who are unhoused, or who have overlapping mental health/substance use disorders and are living with HIV and/or viral hepatitis.
What impact has COVID had on your practice? I was up at Essentia in Duluth when COVID was ballooning. I was part of the incident management team there. COVID shook all of us. Sadly, I think the pandemic—putting on my inequity lens—widened the gaps. I’ve seen a ballooning of wealth disparity, unhoused status. There’s been a rampant, pretty dramatic rise in alcohol and substance use disorders in terms of coping mechanisms, with how hard the world has become. Through a societal lens, I think it’s become very difficult for the folks who are the “have-nots.” They are struggling harder now than ever.
What do you feel good about? I think the gift of being in medicine is you have daily opportunities to make small changes to people’s lives, if nothing more than to let them know they are loved. And I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. People know when you care. You don’t even need to say it to them. They feel that. They can see it in your eyes and your actions.
I think the beautiful opportunities within infectious diseases are that you’re surrounded by colleagues who genuinely care and advocacy opportunities are abundant. So, right now, my advocacy opportunities are to try to commit myself to maintaining funding for people living with HIV. It’s important for me to be the voice for people who don’t have a voice or have power.
“The gift of being in medicine is you have daily opportunities to make small changes to people’s lives, if nothing more than to let them know they are loved.... People know when you care.”
— Dr. Amanda Jean Noska
What changes are happening with infectious disease, and how is it evolving into the future? We’re having hard conversations more often around race and inequities in medicine, which are so overdue and needed. And that’s a beautiful thing. I haven’t witnessed anything like this since I’ve been in medicine. I think it will lead to better outcomes for our patients.
As far as the science goes, I’m so excited about injectable therapies that are already out in the mainstream. We’re doing injectable HIV treatments within the Positive Care Center of Hennepin Healthcare. There’s HIV prevention, or PrEP, injectable therapies we’re offering as well. I expect down the line there will be injectable hepatitis C treatments that have been whispered about but are not ready for the mainstream yet, which is incredibly exciting because they last so long.
What excites you about the work you do? There are new therapies coming for the functional cure of hepatitis B. It’s a DNA virus that integrates into the genome; it’s a very complex virus. Curing it was never thought to be possible. My colleague Jesse Powell and I have been exploring looking at participation in a viral hepatitis trial for the functional cure of hepatitis B for our patients, to offer them the option not to take lifelong medications to control it. That’s very exciting and completely novel. They’re just doing Phase 3 trials now, and if they’re successful, I imagine it could be available in the next couple of years, if the FDA thinks it’s safe and effective.
Improving Surgical Outcomes for Hip and Knee Replacements
Bishoy V. Gad, MD
Orthopedic surgeon, Allina Health Orthopedics
Bishoy V. Gad, MD
Why did you choose your field? When I was 10, I was playing with my grandfather, and we were playing horsey. I’d basically ride on his back. I fell off and hit my knee. He said, “Look, Bishoy, you have two options. You can either fix the automobile—fix what you’re riding—or fix the person when they get hurt.” It kind of resonated with me.
As a 10-year-old, I thought maybe I should just be a doctor. So I worked toward that, but as time went on, my interests started going more toward orthopedic surgery. I’m very surgically inclined; I like working with my hands. I have power tools at home. A lot of the same principles are in orthopedics, believe it or not, as they are in building a really nice table.
Can you elaborate? Being very accurate is important. You want to make sure that if you’re resecting bone, for example, the resection is similar to if you’re making legs for a table—you want them to be the same length. You have to think of ways of doing that. And if you dissect the steps even more and say, “This is what could go wrong if I was attaching the leg to the table here. How am I going to mitigate those challenges?”—you kind of do the same thing with surgery, too. Also, the tools are very similar. If you look at the saw that we use in surgery, you could probably find something that looks similar to it at Home Depot.
How is your field changing lives? I do two surgeries that really impact people’s lives substantially—knee and hip replacements. When you meet people with really bad hip arthritis, for example, they are completely debilitated. Their quality of life is 10 out of 100. Some of them even come in wheelchairs. We are able to take them from a pretty poor quality of life back to relatively normal function.
How is orthopedics evolving into the future? The big thing that’s happening now is robotics. It helps make the surgery less invasive, it reduces blood loss, and it allows us to place implants in places where we weren’t able to in the past. Since we started doing robotic knee replacements here, our lengths of stays have been awesome. We did a knee-replacement surgery at 8:30 this morning. She was in the recovery room by 10:30, and she went home at 1:00. So it’s a pretty nice experience for the patients, too.
The other thing they’re starting to do—both in education and for surgeons—is virtual reality, where we’re starting to see ways where you can plan out your surgery and do the surgery virtually, especially for complex cases, so that you can play out the options. It’s like playing chess. If you’re playing chess and you see what your opponent does and you have a variety of responses, it allows you to play out those responses to see what the outcomes are going to be without actually doing it on a person, if you will.
What excites you about your work? What do you love about it? A lot of things. I have a really great team. Seeing my patients do well is really exciting, too. It is pretty awesome when someone comes in a wheelchair and at their first post-op visit, they’re walking in with a cane. The patient has their life back, basically. It’s not because of me—I didn’t invent hip replacements; I just learned how to do them. We’re very fortunate to be involved in this field so that we can help people.
Helping Youth Improve Their Mental Health
Sara Polley, MD
Medical director for National Youth Continuum, Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, Plymouth
Sara Polley, MD
Tell me about what you do. I’m a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist, board-certified in addiction medicine. About half my role is seeing patients ages 12 to 25 who have what we call co-occurring illness—substance use diagnoses and mental illness—and I serve as their psychiatrist. I also have a role within our organization on a national level representing the needs of young people and their families when it comes to treatment.
What are some of this group’s special needs? We are a 12-step facilitation program, in addition to other evidence-based treatments for addiction we offer, but oftentimes young people have a different way of applying that to their lives. Young people sometimes have different ideas about spirituality than older people, so we have to be flexible. We also do a lot of motivational interviewing, which is a way to work with patients that is focused on what they want to work on, helping them think about their values, what kind of life they want to have. The other piece is we think of substance use and mental illness as family diseases. So we work a lot with the parents and the caregivers or other family members on how to help plan for a young person in our residential program to go home and be successful in their family unit.
Why did you choose your field? My dad struggled with alcohol use disorder when I was growing up. I was aware of how much that was an actual disease and how much he suffered from the disease—but also how shameful it was to have a family member who struggled with it and how it felt like it was different from other diseases. By going to medical school, I realized that’s not true. It actually is a disease, but as a society, we’re still not in a place where we acknowledge that. We still think of it as a failure on that person’s part. I wanted to be part of the change to help people see it differently.
Do you have statistics on how COVID has affected people with mental health or addiction issues? People are reporting all-time high levels of anxiety and depression. Adults are reporting all-time high levels of alcohol use. Interestingly, young people, probably because of more family cohesion during the pandemic, saw drops in their amount of substance use. But young people who were already using before the pandemic are now having more serious illness than they ever had before. They had already turned to using substances as a coping skill, and when things got more stressful, they more heavily relied on that as a way to cope, and their illness progressed faster. There’s a lot more bad stuff that can happen to someone more quickly because of how strong the drugs are now.
How do you help people cope? Most of us in the psychiatric field embrace multidisciplinary care, meaning we understand the importance of collaborating with many other types of professionals, whether that’s the school system, other physicians, therapists, community leaders, community support groups.
Are more psychiatrists needed? I cannot stress that enough: There are over 1,000 kids that need to see a child psychiatrist for every 1 child psychiatrist. There’s no way that every child psychiatrist can fulfill the need.
“One of the reasons I love working with teenagers and young people is that there’s this amazing resilience.”
— Dr. Sara Polley
What’s on the horizon? It’s exciting to be in this field because there’s a rapid expansion in our knowledge of our brain and genetics and even epigenetics, which is how our environment changes our genes, and how that relates with the development of addiction and the development of mental illness. We’re going to be able to get a lot more precise when it comes to the medications, and even other types of treatment we use for mental illness. That is called neuromodulation. Right now, when we give a medicine, for example, we give it to the whole brain, and it does things in the whole brain and even the whole body. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to design medications to be more targeted to specific parts of the brain that are having a hard time. That would minimize people’s risks of side effects.
What else excites you about the work that you do? One of the reasons I love working with teenagers and young people is that there’s this amazing resilience and excitement, even for people who are having a hard time. There’s this idea that “my life is just beginning” and that “even if things up until now have been really bad, I can shed that and come out as a new person.” I see that happen all the time in my job, which is so awesome.
People feel very connected to us after treatment. We’ve had adults stop at the front desk and say, “I was driving past, and I was here 15 years ago, and you guys saved my life.” It’s really cool, actually.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Meet the Rising Stars
This is the ninth edition of our Top Doctors: Rising Stars list— exceptional physicians who have been fully licensed to practice for approximately 10 years or less. When compiling any list of this nature, research is essential. We asked physicians to nominate one or more doctors (excluding themselves) to whom they would go if they or a loved one were seeking medical care. From there, candidates were grouped into 42 specialties and evaluated on myriad factors, including (but not limited to) peer recognition, professional achievement, and disciplinary history. Doctors with the highest scores from each grouping were invited to serve on a blue-ribbon panel that evaluated the other candidates. It should be noted, doctors cannot pay to be included on this list, nor are they paid to provide input. Physicians are chosen using a patented multiphase selection process combining peer nominations and evaluations with independent research. In the end, only doctors who acquired the highest total points appear on Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s 2023 Top Doctors: Rising Stars list. Of course, no list is perfect. Many qualified doctors providing excellent care are not included on this year’s list. However, if you’re looking for exceptional physicians who have earned the confidence and high regard of their peers, you can start your search here. In addition to the list you find here, this year’s group of Rising Stars will join a prestigious group of doctors from more than 20 cities around the country who have been selected to Super Doctors, the full list of which you can find at superdoctors.com.
See the full list of 2023 Rising Stars.
© 2023 MSP Communications. All rights reserved. Super Doctors® is a registered trademark of MSP Communications. Disclaimer: The information presented is not medical advice, nor is Super Doctors a physician referral service. We strive to maintain a high degree of accuracy in the information provided. We make no claim, promise, or guarantee about the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of the information contained in the directory. Selecting a physician is an important decision that should not be based solely on advertising. Super Doctors is the name of a publication, not a title or moniker conferred upon individual physicians. No representation is made that the quality of services provided by the physicians listed will be greater than that of other licensed physicians, and past results do not guarantee future success. Super Doctors is an independent publisher that has developed its own selection methodology; it is not affiliated with any federal, state, or regulatory body. Self-designated practice specialties listed in Super Doctors do not imply “recognition” or “endorsement” of any field of medical practice, nor do they imply certification by a Member Medical Specialty Board of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) or that the physician has competence to practice the specialty. List research concluded February 10, 2023.
