Pain

Tags

All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!

Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.

This is a past event that happened on Saturday, February 11th, 2017 at 2:30pm.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart, grief of memory.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon

What is it to feel pain? We sense it in the body, as a non-trivial, unmediated and imperative perceptual event associated with tissue damage, possessing particular spatiotemporal characteristics of a physical object (e.g., location, quantity, intensity, duration). Pain, nevertheless, is also a subjective event—i.e., is an experience itself, not merely the representation of an object of a perceptual experience—residing on an affective-emotional axis. It seems self-evident that pain is a biologically functional “good” in promoting a hierarchy of behaviors to restore a homeostatic organismic state. What is the latest scientific understanding of pain and its management, the role of analgesics, particularly opioids, their use and abuse? How do we advance the science of pain ethically with respect to humans and other species?

Participants:

Apkar Apkarian

Professor of Physiology
Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine

“I am Professor of Physiology, Anesthesiology, and PM&R at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Over the past two decades my lab has been devoted to unravelling the brain mechanisms underlying chronic back pain (CBP), which has culminated in over 50 papers and a current clinical trial designed to arrest the development of CBP. In the... read more! »

Inna Belfer

Health Scientist Administrator/Project Officer
Office of Research on Women’s Health

Dr. Belfer is world-recognized expert in human pain genetics and assessement of clinical pain and pain-related traits. She started her career as a neurologist, and then got extensive training in neurobiology and human genetics. Since 2001, her primary interest has been the relationship between gene polymorphisms and complex phenotypes such as pain, psychiatric disorders, and... read more! »

Anis Dizdarevic

Assistant Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center

Anis Dizdarevic MD is an assistant clinical professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. He specializes in acute and chronic pain, causes, evolution and management. His particular interest is in pain prevention, minimally invasive pain management and mind-body remodeling and rehabilitation mechanisms. Dr. Dizdarevic received his medical degree and specialty training... read more! »

Allen Fein

Professor, Department of Cell Biology, UConn Health

Alan Fein is a Professor of Cell Biology in the School of Medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center. After receiving his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Dr. Fein went to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole where he eventually became the Director of the Laboratory of Sensory Physiology. Dr.... read more! »

Rebecca Seal

Assistant Professor
Departments of Neurobiology and Otolaryngology
Center for Pain Research, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Seal is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Otolaryngology and the Pittsburgh Center for Pain Research. Her work has focused on the neurobiology of neurotransmitter transporters and their role in nervous system function including hearing, vision, motor output and pain. Dr. Seal began her studies of neural basis of pain... read more! »