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Foreword

No North American pain educator today is more highly esteemed than Beth Hogans. Her career has been informed not only by her medical and scientific training as a scientist and neurologist, but also by broad interests in literature and the humanities. Dr. Hogans' early work identified, in a series of landmark studies, deficits and gaps in the medical student curriculum related to pain. Together with colleagues, she inaugurated an innovative course at Johns Hopkins for entering medical students about pain. For over a decade, this course has served as a model for other pain educators. It spans not only conventional biomedical content but also the experiential and social dimensions of pain. As the course has evolved, so have the fields of pain research, education, and policy. Throughout this time, Beth led the charge to more broadly advance clinical competence in pain. Working collaboratively, she created a scholarly journal section dedicated to pain education. Through this, she guided her peers in the field, raising the level of scholarship in pain education and supporting the development of clinician‐educators, nationally and internationally, continually seeking to innovate and disseminate academic advances. Central among these advances has been the reaffirmation that pain is a clinically salient subjective experience heavily influenced by social processes such as isolation and stigma that add to suffering.

Advances in educational psychology have been applied by Dr. Hogans and colleagues to render pain education more effective and efficient. The techniques of role‐playing, narrative, re‐enactment of brief pain, such as BandAid removal, have been incorporated into the course. Beth has had a particular interest in harnessing the neurobiology of learning to optimize pain education, whether through ensuring that experiences are of relatively brief duration so as not to overload students' cognitive capacity, and providing copious illustrations to harness other means to convey packets of knowledge, e.g. text. The practical results of such a sophisticated approach are embodied in Pain Medicine at a Glance: focused one‐ to two‐page chapters that convey the essence of a topic or clinical situation in a way that all members of an interprofessional pain care team can quickly absorb and apply. The consistent delivery of linked pieces of knowledge by a single exemplary clinician‐educator‐scientist – with practical dicta such as watching out for their own safety, or displaying compassion and empathy – conveys what it must be like for a student or fellow to accompany Beth in the clinic or on bedside rounds.

I believe that the magic by which Dr. Hogans' presence and style suffuse this book derives from its being a single‐author volume. Those who know Beth or have heard her speak will recognize the prose of the present volume as conveying her voice. Single‐author volumes on complex topics (think Bonica, Beecher, Ballas on sickle cell pain, or Selye on stress) are becoming more and more uncommon as fewer and fewer scholars – particularly clinician‐scholars – have the breadth of knowledge to single‐handedly convey their oeuvre. Two thousand years ago, Horace, the Roman playwright, satirist, and father of literary criticism, in Ars Poetica urged writers to choose their subject judiciously, in harmony with their own interests and abilities. That done, “neither elegance of style nor clarity of expression shall desert the [writer] by whom the subject matter is chosen judiciously.” Devoting her career to becoming an exemplary clinician‐educator, Beth has indeed chosen her subject wisely. Her descriptions of problematic situations and how to manage them (e.g. tapering opioids in a patient reluctant to do so) speak with clinical credibility. This volume is a testament to her mastery of the field of pain, and her own personal approach to interdisciplinary pain education, that call to mind the historical mission statement of a leading Boston hospital: “where science and kindliness unite.”

Daniel B. Carr, MD, DABPM, FFPMANZCA (Hon.)

Professor Emeritus, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston

Founding Director, Tufts Program on Pain Research, Education and Policy

Past President, American Academy of Pain Medicine

Honorary Member, International Association for the Study of Pain.