Pain Management Division

The Pain Management Division includes the following faculty members:  Richard L. Boortz-Marx, MD, MS; William Blau, MD, PhD; LeKisha Edwards, PhD;  Amy Goetzinger, PhD; Dominika James, MD, Palak Turakhia, MD, MPH, and Manoj Wunnava, MD.   Karen McCain, FNP, is a Nurse Practitioner at the Southern Village Pain Clinic. 

The division provides comprehensive care for both acute and chronic pain syndromes.

The Acute Pain Service provides daily management of patients with postoperative, post-traumatic, and other types of acute pain requiring specialized interventions such as epidural analgesia, other regional anesthetic techniques, or complex pharmacological management. The service does not provide routine management for patients on IV-PCA postoperatively, but does so when consulted by the primary service. The service has significant expertise in providing postoperative analgesia via continuous peripheral nerve block catheter. 

The Chronic Pain Service provides comprehensive, interdisciplinary patient care at the Anesthesiology Pain Management Center. These are hospital-based outpatient clinics for the management of chronic and cancer pain. It draws upon the expertise of our faculty as well as consultants from dentistry, psychiatry, neurology, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, rheumatology and physical medicine and rehabilitation and other specialists. Our dedicated clinic facility includes specialized procedure rooms with state of the art monitoring, interview rooms, C-arm fluoroscopy, quantitative sensory testing (current perception threshold), and psychologists office on-site.

In addition, the chronic pain staff provides consultations for complex inpatient pain management problems, and daily rounds are performed.

Richard L. Boortz-Marx, MD, MS, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology
Director of Pain Medicine.

Areas of Special Interest: cancer pain, mechanisms, and psychosocial impacts of cancer pain.  He is interested in intraspinal drug delivery mechanisms as it relates to the treatment cancer pain.   Other areas of interest are related to pain in the elderly and pelvic pain.

William S. Blau, MD, PhD, Professor of Anesthesiology
Director, Pain Fellowship Training Program

Areas of Special Interest:  Spine pain diagnostics and therapeutics; acute, chronic, and cancer pain; clinical use of chronic opioid therapy; interventional pain therapy; preventive analgesia.

LeKisha Y. Edwards, Ph.D. Clinical Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology

Amy M. Goetzinger, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology

 Dominika L. James, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology

Areas of Special Interest: Evaluation and treatment of axial pain implementing pharmacological and interventional approaches including spinal cord neuromodulation techniques, interventional therapies for headache treatment including radiofrequency ablation techniques and peripheral nerve neurostimulation, acute pain management  

Palak B. Turakhia, MD, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology

Manoj Bobby Subbarao Wunnava,, Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology

Areas of Special Interest:  Neuromodulation therapies; perioperative pain management; treatment of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome; management of axial pain; interventional therapies for management of headache, intrathecal therapy for management of cancer pain.