How can Pain Medicine Relate to Surgery?

Question

I would like to become either a Pain Medicine Physician or Surgeon, but some how combine both , if anyone knows how you can relate each other in a job please tell !!!

Answer 1

if you become an anesthesiologist with a pain management fellowship, you can do both. the surgical procedures that you would be doing would be fairly limited, things like implantation of spinal catheters and pumps, but you would also have plenty of other procedures you could do during the course of your "normal" anesthesia job- things like spinals, epidurals, etc...

Answer 2

Can't do both per se:

You could become a Neurosurgeon, though

Pain Medicine is done usually through the college of Anaesthetics

Very different training to surgery. The training for both is long and arduous. It is very uncommon for a surgeon to change to become a physician type ... or an anaesthetist to become a surgeon.

I'm sure some people have done it, but it's rare and the colleges frown upon it to some degree.

Answer 3

Watch what you ask for.... chronic pain patients are a difficult bunch to deal with.

If you want to go into pain management, then you should do an anesthesia residency followed by a year or two of pain management fellowship.

If you want to be a surgeon, then you need to do a surgical residency. By the time you finish that, you will have either decided upon a surgical sub-specialty, or you'll find a way to incorporate pain management into your surgical practice. I'm betting, though, that once you get through a surgical residency, you'll be so sick of people whining about pain that you'll abandon the pain management thing.

Seriously, once you finish a residency, you'll make your practice what you want it to be. You just need to decide if you have the personality of an anesthesiologist or surgeon.

Answer 4

Ther are interventional pain medicine doctors who insert pumps and implantable nerve stimulators in certain patients. Not to mention other cryosurgical procedures.