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James Clarkson, MD

Assistant Professor Surgery
Michigan State University
Michigan State University

Dr James Clarkson MD is a Canadian-born, British British-educated plastic and Hand surgeon living and working at Michigan State University. He attended the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry between 1990 and 1995. He was drawn to Plastic Surgery and following a year at University College London, he obtained an MSc in Surgical Sciences, then finished his Plastic Surgical training and graduated from the Pan Scotland Plastic Surgical Training program in 2008, having served the British National Health for 13 years. He attended the Christine Kleinert Hand and Microvascular fellowship between 2008 and 2010. Since 2010 he has worked as a Plastic and Hand Surgeon at Michigan State.
Following 5 years predominantly working in Head and Neck Microvascular reconstruction he refocused his work on Hand Surgery and since 2015 has set up a WALANT hand practice for 70% of his cases. Frustrated by patient fears regarding awake local anesthesia techniques in hand surgery he pioneered the use of Virtual Reality in 2016, performing the first RCT published in 2019 demonstrating decreased injection pain for patients with an anxiety disorder and reduced levels of anxiety with increased enjoyment for patients who used VR during WALANT surgery. He has since written the only published guidelines for WALANT surgery based in the office for the US, examined infection rates for office-based procedures, and confirmed his RCT with patient-reported outcome studies.
He sits on the American Society of Plastic Surgeons Patient Safety Committee and Healthcare Delivery Committee. In 2019 he cofounded Wide Awake VR and is their Chief medical Officer in order to create a VR system that is suitable to apply to patients controlled from a third-party tablet.

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