ASA August 2003 Newsletter

The Section on Annual Meeting has worked with the Committee on Pain Medicine and its Chair, James P. Rathmell, M.D., to increase the number and diversity of sessions on pain medicine that will be offered at the ASA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California. To parallel the growth of interest in pain medicine, attendees will be able to choose from a series of new educational sessions devoted to the management of patients with acute and chronic pain.

When the Refresher Courses begin on Saturday, October 11, there will be seven sessions covering topics of interest to the pain consultant in addition to several on regional anesthesia. The range of content of these Refresher Courses is quite broad and covers diagnosis and treatment of neuropathic pain, back pain and spinal pain as well as the use of intrathecal drug delivery and neurostimulation for management of chronic pain syndromes.

A completely new educational venue for this year will be the hands-on, cadaver-based, interventional pain management workshops led by Sunil J. Panchal, M.D., and Pamela P. Palmer, M.D. The workshops will be offered as a menu of five individual courses over Saturday and Sunday, October 11 and 12, and will be conducted at the Moscone Center. Since these programs will include both didactic presentations as well as quality hands-on experience time for participants, enrollment will be limited. Individuals may choose to attend several of the sessions to meet their educational needs. The workshops offered follow:

• Spinal Cord Stimulation — (half-day didactics, half-day hands-on experience with eight cadavers, limited to 50 participants).

• Intrathecal Infusion Pumps — (half-day didactics, half-day hands-on experience with eight cadavers, limited to 50 participants).

• Radiofrequency Ablation — (half-day with two cadavers, limited to 15 participants).

• Discography/ Intradiscal Electrothermocoagulation (IDET)/Nucleoplasty — (half-day with three cadavers, limited to 15 participants).

• Fluoroscopically Guided Nerve Blocks featuring sympathetic nerve blocks, visceral nerve blocks and transforaminal epidural injections — (half-day with three cadavers, limited to 15 participants).

In addition, other workshops will cover a broad spectrum of topics related to pain medicine. These sessions permit attendees to have detailed, hands-on experience using mannequins and other teaching devices. Titles of the workshops include “Acupuncture,” “Neurologic Examination for the Pain Physician” and “Ophthalmic Regional Anesthesia.” Several workshops will be devoted to nerve blocks: “Upper and Lower Extremity Nerve Blocks,” “Blocks for Complex Regional Pain Syndromes” and “Pediatric Nerve Blocks.”

The educational format of the Problem-Based Learning Discussions (PBLD) has grown in popularity, largely because these small group sessions permit in-depth discussions regarding complex clinical scenarios. Several of the PBLDs at the Annual Meeting will focus on diagnosis and clinical management of patients with several types of chronic pain, including back pain, intractable cancer pain and complex regional pain syndromes. Some of these sessions will be offered more than once to permit attendance by a larger number of learners.

Attendance at the Refresher Courses, Workshops and PBLD sessions is limited. Tickets for these offerings may be purchased via the meeting registration forms and online at <www2.ASAhq.org>.

Panels on pain medicine permit multiple experts to present information on a single topic. Meeting participants may select from available panels offered throughout the meeting.

In a Clinical Forum on Monday, October 13, the moderator and panel participants will discuss the clinical management of two patients with pain issues. The first case focuses on a woman who has had a thoracotomy for lung cancer and now has burning pain and hypersensitivity in her surgical scar. The second case discussion will be directed to management of a man with chronic low-back pain who is now unable to work. The Clinical Forum gives attendees the opportunity to interact in the discussion.

Information about these sessions as well as the entire meeting program can be found at <www2.ASAhq.org>. A search feature on the Web site allows all sessions to be located by day, type of session and content area so that you can plan your meeting activities in advance. We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

Arnold J. Berry, M.D., is Professor of Anesthesiology, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia.

Sunil J. Panchal, M.D., is Director of Interventional Pain Medicine and Associate Professor, Departments of Interdisciplinary Oncology and Anesthesiology, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, University of South Florida College of Medicine, Tampa, Florida.

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