Gabor B. Racz

Gábor Béla Rácz (born 1937), is a Hungarian-American board-certified anesthesiologist and professor emeritus at Texas Tech University Health Science Center (TTUHSC) in Lubbock, Texas, where he is also Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Anesthesiology and Co-Director of Pain Services. He has worked in the field of chronic back pain and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS).

In 1982, he designed the Racz catheter, a flexible, spring-wound catheter with a small fluoroscopic probe. In 1989, he developed epidural lysis of adhesions, sometimes referred to as percutaneous adhesiolysis, or simply the Racz procedure. It is a minimally invasive, percutaneous intervention for treating chronic spinal pain often due to scarring after post lumbar surgery syndrome, sometimes called failed back surgery, and also low-back and radicular pain from spinal stenosis, a disease of aging. The procedure is somewhat similar to an epidural and is used when conventional methods have failed. The Racz procedure may employ the use of a wire-bound catheter to mechanically break-up or dissolve scar tissue, also called epidural adhesions or fibrosis, which have formed around the nerve roots, and allows for local anesthetics, saline, and steroids to be injected into the affected area.

Racz was born in Hungary and, as a young man, had aspirations to become a medical doctor. He was a second-year medical student in November 1956 when he was forced to flee Hungary after the Soviets invaded Budapest in response to the Hungarian Revolution. He eventually arrived in England and resumed his education. He graduated from the University of Liverpool School of Medicine, and worked in the UK until 1963 at which time he moved to the United States. He completed his anesthesiology residency at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. He also worked as an associate attending anesthesiologist and respiratory consultant for other hospitals including the Veterans Administration Hospital, and the UHS Chenango Memorial Hospital in Norwich, New York, before moving to Lubbock, Texas, where he became the first chairman of anesthesiology for the then-new Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC). Racz is also one of the founders of the World Institute of Pain. Provided by Wikipedia