Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. Pain is one of the most common reasons patients seek medical care. The public and personal cost is enormous. At the Department of Anesthesiology's Division of Pain Medicine, we are engaged in education, clinical care and research, with the goal of improving the lives of pain patients.
We are dedicated to the following:
- Providing state-of-the-art care to help patients with pain increase their function, quality of life and decrease pain and suffering
- Providing quality education for health care providers, patients and the community
- Research to further the advancement of the understanding of pain and its treatments
The Division of Pain Management operates an acute pain and consultation service for in-house patients, the Pain Clinic at the Jackson Medical Mall. The Acute Pain and Consultation Service actively manage patients with postoperative pain and hospitalized patients with pain issues requiring specialized evaluation and interventions. The chronic pain clinic manages patients with chronic cancer and non-cancer pain using a multidisciplinary approach involving both interventional and noninterventional modalities with the goal of improving quality of living and easing of pain. As a specialist clinic, patients are seen on a referral basis.
The Pain Management Fellowship at the University Of Mississippi Medical Center is a one-year program designed to provide subspecialty training in pain medicine for residents or practitioners who have completed an approved residency training program. The fellowship year is considered a PGY-5 position. A multidisciplinary program utilizing multimodal treatment protocols including both interventional and noninterventional techniques is geared towards providing our fellows with the scientific and clinical foundations of pain medicine. Our fellows gain broad experience in rational medicine selection, peripheral nerve blocks, central neural blockades, use of implantable devices, acupuncture, and public health principles in providing care for a broad spectrum of patients with acute, chronic and cancer pain.
The division is also engaged in basic and clinical research and presents such papers at the local and national levels. Research opportunities are also available in the study of the epidemiology of pain and pain therapy. Examples of research endeavors include the use of fentanyl discs in managing cancer pain, efficacy of duloxetine in gastroparesis pain, community perception and response pattern to illicit drug use, home therapies in patients with sickle cell pain, agmentine levels in CSF, and mechanism of opioid and non-opioid compound mediated analgesia and tolerance.
