Presenter: Dr. Christopher Honey

Biography: Dr. Christopher Honey completed his medical training at the University of Toronto and then did a doctoral degree in neurophysiology at Oxford University as a Canadian Rhodes Scholar. He did his neurosurgical training at the University of British Columbia and Harvard University. His research is focused on movement disorders and pain. He headed the world’s first RCT of DBS for spasmodic dysphonia. He was the first physician to recognize and successfully treat hemi-laryngopharyngeal spasm (HELPS syndrome) in 2016. He discovered and successfully treated the first person in the world with VANCOUVER syndrome in 2019. He has made fundamental changes to the understanding of human pain pathways.

Dr. Honey was president of the Canadian Neuromodulation Society (2016-2019) and hosted the annual national meetings in Whistler (2018) and Iqaluit (2019). The Iqaluit meeting brought attention to the fact that neuromodulation was underutilized in the Canadian North and set up referral patterns for patients in Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and Yukon.

In 2018, Dr. Honey was elected President of the World Neurosurgical Federation for Cranial Nerve Disorders. This group has a major interest in Microvascular Decompression (MVD) and the 3rd World Congress of this society will be hosted in Vancouver in 2022.

Dr. Honey has a strong commitment to teaching and has had the pleasure to train 23 neurosurgeons from around the world during their one-year fellowship with him in Vancouver. He has provided humanitarian surgical care in Liberia (performing the first successful brain tumor removal, the first spine operation, and the first pediatric shunt) and in Ghana. He has been invited to operate in China, Indonesia, and performed the first DBS in Kuwait.