Growing up, neurosurgeon and AMA member Sonia V. Eden, MD, was told by her mother that she was “hardwired” to work on the brain.
In fact, Dr. Eden performed her first procedure when she was about 4 years old.
“My mom was lying down because she was having a real bad migraine headache and I told her, ‘I’m going to make you feel better—I’m going to do surgery on you and make your headaches go away,” recalled Dr. Eden, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center and Semmes Murphy Clinic in Memphis, Tennessee.
“I went to the kitchen, I got some utensils, came back, had her close her eyes. I role-played doing a surgery,” she added. “When I was finished, I said, ‘Now, open your eyes. Are your headaches gone?’”
And they were. At least, that is what mom told little Sonia.
Dr. Eden’s fascination with the brain continued into middle school. After her science class had finished dissecting a fetal pig, she asked her teacher: “Can you help me get into the skull? Can we open up the skull so I can see the brain?”
And one summer, while in high school, Dr. Eden was using computers at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital to do research on the average volume of brain tumors, she was asked if she wanted to see an operation.
“They saw my interest in the brain and asked if I wanted to see a brain surgery, and they made it possible for me to see a brain-tumor resection,” she recalled. “I was hooked. I was in that surgery, and I just knew: This is it.”
Henry Ford Health is part of the AMA Health System Member Program that provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
Becoming a physician advocate
“I've always had this kind of attraction or fascination with the nervous system and neural networks,” Dr. Eden said.
But after earning her medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School in 2000 and completing a general surgery internship at the at the University of Michigan Medical Center in 2001, Dr. Eden’s interests broadened.
The catalyst for this new awareness was the 2003 publication of Unequal Treatment. Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. The report, published by what was then known as Institute of Medicine—today the National Academy of Medicine—detailed the evidence showing that “race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received.”
“Coming out of medical school, I think my focus was on matching into neurosurgery,” Dr. Eden said. “But then once I became a neurosurgeon, once the Unequal Treatment report came out—that just floored me, and it was quite shocking to me and really made me want to make a difference from a health inequity perspective.”
Dr. Eden co-founded the American Society of Black Neurosurgeons (ASBN) in 2021, an organization that has made growing the workforce of Black neurosurgeons a major focus of its activities.
Most recently, Dr. Eden has been part of the third cohort of physicians participating in the Medical Justice in Advocacy Fellowship, which is a collaborative initiative created by the AMA Center for Health Equity and the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine.
“Now I feel like I'm tackling it on all different ends, and adding the advocacy piece is going to be a great addition,” Dr. Eden said.
“There are like-minded physicians that it has connected me to, and I really have enjoyed getting to know my co-fellows,” she added. “And, hopefully, these will be bonds that will last a lifetime and hopefully, we will all be able to collaborate on some of this important work and keep moving the needle forward.”
Other aspects of the fellowship that Dr. Eden said she has enjoyed include learning how to advocate effectively and integrate it into her clinical role.
She then put that knowledge to use when attending this year’s AMA National Advocacy Conference in Washington.
“This was my first time ever going, and it was a very cool experience and very eye-opening to me to sit down and speak to the legislators and have an opportunity to lend my voice and say where I think legislation needs to go in order to help our citizens have better health care,” Dr. Eden said.
Now living in Oxford, Mississippi, Dr. Eden joined the AMA’s Mississippi delegation on Capitol Hill and met with Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, and Republicans Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Rep. Mike Ezell, as well as a member of Rep. Trent Kelly’s staff.
“It opened up my eyes to some additional work I can do beyond patient care and my research and neurosurgery endeavors,” Dr. Eden said, citing the work of Daniel E. Dawes, former executive director of the Satcher Health Leadership and author of the 2020 book The Political Determinants of Health.
“There are a lot of upstream decisions that can affect the downstream care of our patients and their access to care and can put some at a disadvantage some while giving an advantage to others,” she added. “It's important to have these conversations with the legislators making these laws, so that they can be aware of how their laws can help reduce the inequities in health care.”
Dr. Eden said that her health equity goal is to ensure that “all Americans have the access and possibility of having excellent health,” and that no one is left out because of their race, ethnicity, gender, demographics, social determinants, social status or some other reason.
Research finds significant inequities
Recently, Dr. Eden was senior author of a study published in JAMA Network Open showing “significant disparities” in the administration of intravenous thrombolysis based on socioeconomic, racial and ethnic backgrounds. The study was led by one of Dr. Eden’s mentees, Jean-Luc Kabangu, MD, an AMA member and chief neurosurgery resident at the University of Kansas in Kansas City.
For the study, the researchers examined almost 2.5 million records of acute ischemic stroke patients between 2016 and 2020.
“We both have a desire to address inequities in health care from a neurosurgery lens,” Dr. Eden said of Dr. Kabangu. “This is a study that really further demonstrated that we are continuing to have challenges with respect to access and health care delivery and that socially disadvantaged people—especially Black patients or underrepresented, minoritized patients—tend to not get the access to treatments that other Americans may get.
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Helping build a diverse workforce
“This season of my career has really focused on research in the health equity space, interventions in the health equity space, and trying to dismantle these disparities,” Dr. Eden said.
“One way to do that is to increase the diversity in the physician workforce, which led me to start ASBN and also has led to a lot of the interventions within ASBN to try to get more people that look like me in the pipeline,” she added.
There have been more than 9,200 neurosurgeons trained in the U.S. since brain surgeon Harvey Cushing, MD, opened his Baltimore practice in 1901, Dr. Eden said. Of those, about 190 have been Black and only 36 of those Black neurosurgeons have been women.
“I am in a space where I'm a minority within a minority, and my goal is to increase its representation so that folks coming through after me do have a community and a network that involves all different types of people and does include people that look like them,” she said.
“Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman once said, ‘You can't be what you can't see,’ and I truly believe that,” Dr. Eden added. “So when we come together for our organized neurosurgery conferences, we always have a community touch point.”
Community events have included “Ignite the Brain” programs with middle school children in Chicago and Houston, and a similar event is planned for Los Angeles in October.
Students can walk through a giant inflatable brain, learn its pathology and then speak with ASBN members about their work, the brain and nervous system.
Students are often intrigued and excited about meeting and learning from Black neurosurgeons. Most of the time, students are “surprised, because they haven't seen people who look like them who are doctors or who are neurosurgeons,” Dr. Eden said.
