2026 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner | Dr. David Polly | Scoliosis Dialogues

Uh, well, speaking of those things, you then went through West Point, the Army, Airborne School, uh, Ranger School, Walter Reed.

You've had this extraordinary military career, uh, before and alongside your path to becoming a spine surgeon, and I've read that you said Ranger School was the toughest thing you ever did, not spine surgery.

Um, between Ranger School, complex spine surgery, leading departments, leading societies, what really has been the toughest part?

Yeah.

So Ranger School is about can you survive? And so you're not in a, you know, you're about as low in Maslow's hierarchy as you can go.

And so, uh, I was just, uh, I, I went in at my Army wrestling weight, and I, I didn't have body fat at that point, and I lost 10% of my body mass, and I actually, um, had heatstroke and-

Oh

... had to redo the last 30 days of Ranger School.

I was within five days of finishing and I went down with heatstroke.

And, and, um, and saying, "I'm not gonna quit.

I'm not gonna give up." And that, that Ranger School is designed to, as close as they can, simulate the stress of combat.

And they can't fire live rounds at you, but they can sleep deprive you, calorie deprive you, and, uh, psychologically mess with you, and they were doing all of those things at the same time.

And so it was, how do you persevere through that and make it through? And you had to make it through as a team.

Um, that, uh, you, you couldn't succeed by yourself.

You had to help everybody succeed or nobody succeeded.

So, so it was the physically hardest thing that I've ever done.

Um, but it's a different kind of hard.

You know, it's sort of...

I, I liked Todd's discussions today about track versus football, about is this an individual sport or is this a team sport? And it was a little bit of both.

[laughs] So.

I'm sure there were a lot of things you took away from that experience that helped you be a better surgeon, leader for your hospital, and a society leader.

Yeah.

So I think the biggest thing, so you had to plan what we called missions, and so there's, in the military they call it an operations order.

We're gonna go here, we're gonna do this, and this is how we're gonna do it.

And you had to have very, very detailed planning- And so that set me up very, very well.