Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Megan Crowley-Matoka, PhD
Associate Professor, Medical Education
Faculty, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program
Member, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Fixes and Failures in Pain: Back Surgery

It is almost impossible to talk about pain care in the U.S. today without invoking the opioid overdose crisis. Dominating media headlines, driving public policy, and changing clinical practice, the epidemic rise in deaths associated with opioid use has overwhelmed the conversation about the challenges of treating pain in American medicine. In this two-talk series, I aim to broaden that conversation and also examine its effects by considering two other pain treatment modalities: back surgery and implantable pain medication pumps. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research, I explore how the hopes, fears, and histories that push and pull patients along each of these treatment paths emerge in relation to both the enduring uncertainties of pain itself, and the contemporary anxieties surrounding pain medications.