It’s Friday and my attending is performing procedures in a tiny rural town south of the city.

Which means it’s 11am and I’m still at home. I guess this should sort of feel like a “day off”, but I am knee-deep in three projects and hoping to finish two so I don’t have to work on them over the weekend.

1) Opioid-Induced Hyperalgesia
This is a biggie project (complete with fancy PowerPoint slides!) that I will present to the attending and his entire staff at the end of the month. As an Interventional Pain Management team, they obviously get a TON of requests for prescription narcotics. Hyperalgesia is literally a hyper-active response to pain and a well-known side effect of chronic opioid use. The attending I work with does not prescribe narcotics and refuses to promote their long-term use for pain due to the many side effects that end up clouding the clinical picture and making things worse.

2) Peripheral Neuropathy
This is a mini-topic that I presented yesterday and have to prepare a (hopefully non-boring) single-page write-up for. As a downtown hospital in the Midwest, we see a ton of diabetics, alcoholics, and homeless people with poor nutrition: three very common causes of nerve disorders.

3) Complex Regional Pain Syndrome
Another mini-topic that I presented last week, CRPS is a confusing and devastatingly debilitating disorder. Patients present with excruciating pain in a single limb that is disproportionate to the inciting (often mild) event. They are often unable to bear the touch of even their clothes, socks or shoes without shocking pain. The pathophysiology is still mostly theoretical and unknown, making treatment a difficult moving target.

These projects reminded me of a couple of assignments I had while on my Family Medicine rotation last fall. Today’s photo is from a pamphlet i made for my FM attending when he asked me to read and present a little something on hair loss (two links there if you want to see the bigger versions). I also made one with Luke Skywalker and prostate cancer (again, two links to bigger versions).

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