Veterinary Specialists of the Southeast: Innovative care is hallmark of veterinary practice.

Among his many talents and skills, Dr. Paul Shealy is a man who knows how to multi-task.
Shealy, a board-certified veterinary surgeon and president/chief executive officer of Veterinary Specialists of the Southeast, has been in private practice nine years. Three years ago he moved his practice from Remount Road to its current location on West Montague.
Shealy maintains a second referral and emergency practice in Savannah, alternating between the two offices every week. His associate and fellow surgeon in the practice, Dr. Rob Purnell, also divides his time between Charleston and Savannah.

A total of 40 staffers are employed at both clinics. "The central hospital in Charleston is basically set up as a 24-hour facility", Shealy says. "During the day we have specialists on hand and see referrals from general practitioners. At night the facility functions as an emergency clinic and provides constant monitoring for post-operative patients. Having 24-hour care helps us maintain a level of quality in our practice."

Maintaining quality in the practice means employing the most advanced veterinary care, and Shealy recently introduced a new method of knee surgery known as TPLO (tibial plateau leveling osteotomy). " We're one of the first practices in the Southeast to perform this new knee surgery,he explains. It's basically designed for dogs who have blown out their ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) much like athletes do."

Shealy reports great success with the procedure. "Traditional surgery usually has inconsistent results and almost always leads to arthritis later. This procedure allows us to give these dogs sound treatment without later complications and return them to their normal athletic abilities."

"In the three months the clinic has been performing the procedure, Shealy has erformed 25 operations, all of them successful. We've had some patients who had traditional surgery on one side and we had to do another operation on the other side", Shealy relates. "The second operation is so successful that often the owners will ask us to redo the other side, where the original surgery was performed, using the new procedure.

Dr. Shealy says TPLO was a radically different way of thinking and required some trust on his part. "This technique was proposed at one of the scientific meetings, but it is such a divergence from what we've all learned through our training that it was hard for everyone to understand what the surgeon was trying to describe. But once forward thinkers caught on, it was amazing, a completely different method of treating this type of injury."

Only a relatively small number of surgeons across the United States have been trained to perform TPLO, Shealy notes."We've actually had cases come in from Atlanta, Chapel Hill and other areas when they find out we're the closest facility doing the procedure and one of only two facilities in the U.S. to offer physical therapy along with this surgery."

In addition to this revolutionary surgery, the clinic offers artificial hip replacement, disc herniation treatment, advanced neurological surgery, advanced thoracic and abdominal surgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery and, in an adjoining building, one of Shealy's newest ventures: the Advanced Veterinary Diagnostic & Treatment Center.

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