Hadassah senior plastic surgeon Dr. Allan Billig’s paper for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ journal, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (PRS), is the hands-down winner of the 2024 Best Paper Award as the Best Neck and Head Reconstruction Paper.
“I didn’t even know they had a Best Paper Award,” Dr. Billig confided. “It was a complete surprise.” In his letter notifying Dr. Billig of the award, Dr. Kevin C. Chung, PRS’s Editor in Chief, sounded more excited than surprised, stressing that the article was “the clear winner” and “by a “distinct margin,” based on objective peer-use criteria.
The paper, “Are We Over-operating on Isolated Orbital Floor Fractures?”, examined the conventional wisdom that fractures in the bottom – the ‘floor’ – of the eye socket should automatically be corrected with surgery to avoid eye problems.
What made the article such a blow-out success? “There was nothing new in paper, nothing novel,” Dr. Billig reflects. “We just stopped and said, ‘Listen, we’ve been doing [this surgery] for a long time. Let’s establish critically if it needs to be done.’”
“The assumption was that if the ‘floor’ is ruined, you’d expect the eyeball to sink down,” Dr. Billig continues. “And based on that expectation, you’d want to fix the floor, right? But that’s a difficult surgery and it’s dangerous, because you’re playing with the eyeball, so let’s be sure it’s necessary before we do it.”
Dr. Billig credits his mentor and article coauthor, Canadian surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Fialkov, with the idea of testing the procedure’s efficacy. Fialkov, Head of Plastic Surgery at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, was Dr. Billig’s supervisor during the young surgeon’s post-specialization fellowship. The two have remained close ever since. In fact, they have been reunited four times since the beginning of the war, with Dr. Fialkov traveling to Israel four times at his own expense to help Hadassah treat soldiers with head injuries.
“With all of his years of experience,” Hadassah’s Billig continues, “Jeff said: ‘I have a feeling that no matter how badly the floor is broken, the eyeball will not sink. It’s suspended in that ‘hammock’ of ligaments, and I think the floor doesn’t really make a difference.’”
That’s what the paper showed – that this commonplace, standard-practice surgery makes no difference whatsoever.
“That was a paradigm shift,” Dr. Billig notes. “And I think that’s why it won.”
Original thinking, Rigorous science. International collaboration and the ultimate in peer recognition in the field’s most prestigious journal. Hadassah is leading the way!
Kol Hakavod, Dr. Billig and co., on this huge contribution and huge honor!
Photo caption: Hadassah’s Dr. Allan Billig receives the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery’s 2024 Article of the Year Award from PSR journal editor-in-chief Dr. Kevin C. Chung.