NASS DFNS CLASS OF 2026
Sarvdeep Singh Dhatt, MBBS, MS
PGIMER
Chandigarh, India
Orthopedic Surgeon
NASS Member Since 2014
What originally drew you to the field of spine care?
Honestly, it started with a problem I couldn't ignore during my residency. I was working on designing an affordable pedicle screw system at a time when most of the implants available to us were either prohibitively expensive or simply inaccessible for a large number of patients who needed them. Going through that process — understanding the biomechanics, the manufacturing constraints, what actually mattered for a screw to hold well in bone versus what was just marketing — gave me a level of respect for spine implants that you don't get from just using them off the shelf. By the time I was done, I wasn't just interested in spine surgery, I understood it from the inside out.
That experience also made the comparison to other fields in orthopaedics unavoidable. If you think about most orthopaedic subspecialties as flying a plane — steady, well-charted, predictable — spine surgery felt like flying a jet fighter. The margins are tighter, the stakes are higher, and you're making split-second decisions with the spinal cord and nerve roots a few millimetres from your instruments. There's a precision and intensity to it that I found genuinely addictive. Once you've felt that, it's very hard to go back to anything that feels routine by comparison.
So it was really both things together — the technical problem-solving from building that screw system, and the sheer intensity of the work itself — that pulled me firmly into spine care and kept me there.
How has your involvement with NASS influenced your professional growth or career journey?
My involvement with NASS has been one of the most significant influences on my career as a spine surgeon. Attending the annual meetings early on exposed me to techniques and outcomes data that weren't yet part of mainstream practice in India, and that pushed me to adopt a very structured approach to spine surgery.
Beyond the science, NASS gave me a network of surgeons across the world that I still consult with on complex cases. That kind of informal peer review — being able to reach out to someone who's seen a similar case — has quietly shaped how I approach difficult decisions in the OR.
Serving on the Section on Spinal Cord Injury and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee also taught me how to think about spine care at a systems level, not just procedure by procedure — looking at guidelines, training standards, and how evidence actually gets translated into practice. That broader view has fed back into how I run my own practice and mentor younger surgeons.
If I had to sum it up: NASS didn't just keep me current — it gave me a professional community that's shaped both what I do and how I think about the field.
If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of career advice, what would it be?
If I could go back, I would tell my younger self that I would choose the exact same path in spine surgery all over again without a moment's hesitation, but with a crucial shift in focus. I would urge you to trust your own assessments and rely far more on your hands-on clinical skills to make surgical decisions, rather than letting imaging dictate every move. Most importantly, never lose sight of the human element; remember that anatomical perfection on a postoperative scan is not the ultimate goal, and you must always rely on actual patient outcomes and their improved quality of life to measure your true success rate.