WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Alexander Braley, a fellowship-trained neurosurgeon, to their team at WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital. Dr. Braley specializes in stereotactic and functional neurosurgery with an interest in minimally invasive spine surgery.

Dr. Braley’s informal medical training began when he was young, while helping his mother study for her nursing exams to prepare for a career as an LPN. At the time, he hadn’t given a thought to a career in medicine. Braley grew up in a small town in rural upstate New York, a town that was about 1/10th the size of Wheeling. He grew up in a very blue-collar household– before nursing, his mother was a seamstress, and his father worked at a paper factory.

“I saw my father lose his factory job when his company outsourced work to another country, my mother tried to make ends meet by working multiple jobs,” says Braley. With a work ethic that was ingrained in him by his hard-working parents, Braley became the first person in his family to go to college.

“I was always drawn to science and medicine, and thought research was going to be my calling,” says Braley. “I finished my undergraduate degree in Tampa, FL where I met my beautiful wife who pushed me to fulfill my potential.”

Dr. Braley realized his calling as a surgeon in graduate school, where he had the opportunity to engage in surgeries for research. This realization set him on a path to Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.

“This was a relatively new medical school, and I was a Herbert Wertheim full tuition scholar. During medical school I spent as much time in the OR as I could and found that I was really drawn to the challenge of neurosurgery,” says Dr. Braley.

Dr. Braley completed his residency training at SUNY Upstate in Syracuse NY near his hometown. He then completed a fellowship at WVU in Functional Neurosurgery in Morgantown where he learned deep brain stimulation (DBS) and focused ultrasound, in addition to advanced pain procedures.

“I learned how to be thorough and careful while being efficient and holistic during surgery, workup, and patient care while leveraging bleeding edge technology to help make surgery safer and more effective,” says Dr. Braley.

During his fellowship, Dr. Braley had the opportunities to pitch in at Wheeling Hospital by taking calls on the weekend.

“Wheeling hospital has a storied history with some excellent neurosurgeons here, but in the last few years they were understaffed and needed help,” he says.

During his time at Wheeling Hospital, he fell in love with the hospital, the people, and the staff.

“Wheeling reminds me of my hometown, which has faced many of the same problems with waning industries and underserved health care needs,” he says. “I realized that the needs of the hospital and the patients line up well with my preferred practice pattern and knew that I could be the right fit to help give the support that the area needs.”

Dr. Braley’s specialization – stereotactic and functional neurosurgery – sounds like a mouthful, but it’s easier to understand when you break it down.

“Neurosurgery is surgery on the brain, spine, or peripheral nerves. Stereotactic refers to using technology to reach a point in the body without being able to directly see it, like using GPS to reach a city that is somewhere in the distance past the horizon,” he says.

Functional neurosurgery is concerned with doing neurosurgical procedures that improve the patient’s ability to move for function.

“We try to fix slow stiff moving Parkinson’s patients or try to calm the tremor down on someone who can’t feed themselves without spilling food everywhere.” Says Dr. Braley. “We alleviate or improve pain syndromes like trigeminal neuralgia or failed back syndrome to allow people to be able to return to work or enjoying life.”

Deep brain stimulation targets specific areas of the brain that are involved in different disease processes.

“We place an electrode in the areas of the brain where there is abnormal signal and use small gentle electrical impulses to interrupt the abnormal firing, this creates a precise, adjustable neuromodulation which alleviates or erases the symptoms of these diseases,” says Dr. Braley.

“Watching someone have their DBS turned on for the first time and go from shaking like a leaf to steady as a rock is truly breathtaking.”

There are also new and emerging targets for other conditions such as addiction and depression, which give us great hope for using DBS to treat many conditions that affect millions of people.

Dr. Braley is also excited at the advancements in functional neurosurgery, as new treatments are making it possible for people to improve their quality of life with minimally invasive procedures.

“Focused ultrasound is a new and exciting procedure that I offer my patients that allows many of the benefits of a deep brain stimulator without requiring a surgery. Patients come in with unrelenting tremor and go home the same day with their tremor nearly completely resolved, without any incision,” he says. “I see it as the future of functional neurosurgery.”

As for the inspiration and motivation needed to excel in medicine, Dr. Braley credits his wife, Joy, who has supported him from his undergraduate studies to his move to Wheeling. They have two boys, Adrian and Damian. When he’s not practicing medicine, Dr. Braley loves going to parks and playing with his family, watching sports, and reading about world history.

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