Cerbo Clinic Neurosurgery

One surgeon. No institution. No predetermined outcome.

Cerbo Clinic is an independent, single-surgeon neurosurgical practice. It is not part of a hospital system, a university department, or a multispecialty group.

There is no institutional layer between the patient and the surgeon — consultations, imaging review, surgical planning, and follow-up care are managed by one board-certified neurosurgeon, directly.

The conditions treated span the full scope of neurological surgery:

• Spinal stenosis
• Disc herniation
• Cord compression
• Brain tumors
• Peripheral nerve conditions
• Chiari malformation (CM-I)

Patients are seen for consultation whether or not their condition will ultimately require surgery. The goal of every appointment is an honest assessment of the clinical situation — not a predetermined recommendation.

Board-certified neurological surgery, conducted in five languages

Consultations are conducted in five languages:

For a patient population in the Bay Area where a significant majority of patients are non-native English speakers, this is not incidental. A clinical conversation conducted in a patient's first language produces a different quality of history, a different quality of informed consent, and a different quality of trust than one conducted through approximation.

The focus on adult Chiari malformation that animates chiariclinic.com reflects a specific observation: Chiari is a condition where the surgical decision is harder than the surgery itself, and where the patient has almost always arrived at the consultation having navigated years of inadequate explanation. Managing that clinical complexity well, and explaining it honestly, is the work this practice is built around.

What an independent practice can offer that a large system structurally cannot

The large academic medical centers in the Bay Area — Stanford, UCSF, and others — offer genuine excellence in neurosurgery. They also bring institutional complexity: wait times measured in months, insurance selectivity, and the impersonal rhythms of a high-volume system where the surgeon a patient meets in consultation may not be the surgeon who operates.

Peninsula and Bay Area, California

Cerbo Clinic serves patients across the Peninsula and Bay Area. Referrals from neurologists, primary care physicians, imaging centers, and emergency departments are welcome. Patients may also self-refer directly.

Chiari Clinic is a specialized program of Cerbo Clinic

Chiari Clinic — this site — exists as a dedicated clinical and educational reference for Chiari malformation type I. The five clinical rooms covering radiographic diagnosis, clinical evaluation, conservative management, surgical decision-making, and living with a Chiari diagnosis represent the most complete freely available patient-facing reference for this condition in the Bay Area.

All clinical care described on chiariclinic.com takes place through Cerbo Clinic. Patients seen through this site are patients of Cerbo Clinic — with access to the full scope of neurosurgical services the practice provides, not only Chiari-related care.

The goal of this site has never been to generate surgical volume. It has been to give every patient with a Chiari diagnosis — whether they ultimately need surgery or not — the clearest possible picture of their situation. The patients who find the right answer through this site and never need to see a surgeon are exactly the patients this site was built for.