President's Message: Spring 2006

Benjamin Johnson, MD, MBA

The 2005 Southern Pain Society Annual Meeting was held last October in Lexington, Kentucky. It was an excellent meeting, due principally to the efforts of the program chairman, Jonathan Cole, and the president of the Kentucky Pain Society, Dr. Ballard Wright. In spite of the Gulf Coast hurricane disaster, the meeting was well-attended, and we received excellent reviews on the quality of the meeting. I am grateful to our executive director Lori Postal, as well as all of the speakers and attendees for dedicating their time, attention, and expertise to the success of this meeting. One of the most talked-about presentations was a lunch presentation by Dr. William Witt from the University of Kentucky Pain Center, regarding some recent developments in the usage of ultra-low-dose opioid analgesics in intrathecal drug delivery systems. Another highlight of the meeting was an excellent presentation by Dr. Joe Chen regarding his experiences of delivering medical care to gulf coast pain patients in the midst of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

In this issue of the Southern Pain Society newsletter, we present articles from Jennifer Bolen and Ike Eriator, and Dan Doleys, experts in their respective fields. As many of you know, attorney Jennifer Bolen is the current recipient of the SPS President's Award for her distinguished service to the pain community at large. She has been instrumental in educating pain specialists and other healthcare providers in the regulatory and medicolegal implications of both the usage of controlled substances, as well as the issue of compliance with billing and coding of heathcare delivery. Dr. Ike Eriator, MD, MPH is a pain specialist in Jackson, MS with special expertise in the epidemiology and the critical reading of medical literature. Dr. Eriator is an anesthesiologist and fellowship-trained, board-certified pain specialist at the University of Mississippi, who also teaches epidemiology at Jackson State University. He has created a series of articles regarding the accurate interpretation of scientific literature as it relates to pain medicine. Dr. Dan Doleys, PhD, president-elect of the Southern Pain Society, is an internationally-renowned psychologist with special expertise in multi-disciplinary pain management, and specific interest in outcome measures regarding implantable technologies.

Also in this newsletter is the beginning of a series of editorials on practice-related issues. The first article addresses some basic issues of labor costs in a medical practice. It is my hope that these editorials will encourage some correspondence and questions from our readership.

< Back to Current President's Message

Archive: Spring 2006 | Summer 2005 | Spring 2005 | Spring 2004
Spring 2002 | Summer 2002 | Winter 2002