Introduction
Meet Dr. Johnathan Goree, an Associate Professor in Anesthesiology, as well as the Division Director and Fellowship Program Director for Chronic Pain at UAMS. He considers his clinical title to be a “Quality of Life Specialist,” and in this episode, learn more about what his clinical and research interests are, as well as about his interests outside the hospital, from mixology and cooking to traveling!
Transcript
Hannah: Welcome to Mentor Spotlight, a podcast designed to help connect UAMS students to faculty mentors. We’re Hannah-
Weijia: And Weijia
Hannah: -Your hosts for this episode. Today we have Dr. Johnathan Goree, an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at the, at UAMS.
Dr. Goree: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Weijia: Thank you for joining us! Dr. Goree is also the Director of the Chronic Pain Division, Program Director of the Chronic Pain Medicine fellowship. And the Chief of Staff Elect for the UAMS Health Hospital System. Dr. Goree completed medical school and residency at Cornell Medical School. And Chronic Pain Medicine fellowship at Emory University Hospital. In 2014, he joined the faculty at the UAMS. His research interests include racial disparities in chronic pain care, implementation science, complex regional pain syndrome, and efficacy of novel opioid-sparing technologies like neuromodulation.
Hannah: Welcome! So I know we talked a little bit about your educational background in our intro, but would you mind just telling us more about yourself and what made you decide to pursue medicine in like this specific career path.
Dr. Goree: Yeah sure. I will try not to be long winded because I could probably -that’s a 30 min question- but, I am, I grew up in Memphis, but I moved to Arkansas when I was 13. So I went to high school here in Little Rock, like right around the corner at Catholic High.
Hannah: Ok!
Dr. Goree: So I consider Little Rock my home. Left for a while, and we talked about all the places I did training, but. At some point, I decided I wanted to be an anesthesiologist. And honestly, my decision to do that centered around, really with my mental definition of a doctor was. And that was someone who had the ability to respond to emergency situations. So. I always thought about if someone were to drop dead right in front of me, who would be best, you know, best equipped to save that person’s life. And I’ve always enjoyed high pressure situations, whether that be sports, whether that be in academics. And I didn’t really know what that was when I went to medical school. So, I didn’t know whether that was a surgeon or an ER doctor, but then as I began to do my third year rotations, I really realized that, you know, the people who run codes in the operating room are anesthesiologists, and the people who really understand complex physiology are anesthesiologists. And so that’s what I decided I wanted to do. I had a little bit of a crisis of identity while I was in anaesthesia residency. Because, I realized that I really missed patients. So when you’re an anesthesiologist, or an OR anesthesiologist, most of your patients are asleep. And you’re standing behind a curtain and you’re monitoring them and you’re trying to prevent emergencies from happening. I realized that I wanted to see patients every day, and I wanted to follow them longitudinally, and have them tell me about their kids and learn about my wife. And so I started exploring this world of pain medicine. And I think the thing that sealed it for me is that I have a wisdom tooth removed. And I had to be put to sleep for it. And when I woke up, I had a lot of pain. And they gave me some fentanyl. And I actually went apneic. So I, for lack of a better term, and I’m using air quotes because you can’t see me, I overdosed on fentanyl. And it was iatrogenic. And I was given naloxone to reverse me. And that was the most. It was one of the worst moments of my life. I had 10 out of 10 mind numbing pain for about 30 minutes. I would have done anything to get rid of that pain. And I realized two things kind of shortly after that. One was that there are patients who live that way every single day of their life. And I wanted to help them. And then the second kind of informed a lot of my research interests is that a lot of the people who experience that or don’t have the resources that are being treated are underrepresented minorities. Are people who are in rural communities. And so that really informed my decision to come back to UAMS and to kind of ensure that pain care is not only done well and that we are working on preventing opioid overdoses, but to make sure that it’s equitable.
Hannah: Well, thank you for sharing. I know like, that must have been a very, very frightening situation.
Dr. Goree: Yeah, it wasn’t wasn’t fun.
Hannah: Definitely, definitely would shape one’s career path and I can see how.
Dr. Goree: Yeah, and I will say that I have not ever given, and even as an – and I’ve worked as an anesthesiologist before I really 100% concentrated on pain- I’ve never given anyone a full dose of naloxone. And most of the time, because anesthesiologists have the, you know, when someone overdoses on opioids, it means that they’re basically too high to remember to breathe. And so if you breathe for them, then they don’t have to have it reversed. You just breathe for them until the drug wears off. So. I have bag-masked people or intubated people in that situation for 15 or 20 mins and gotten them through it. But I think it’s definitely influenced how I practice.
Weijia: So what is your typical work day look like now – now that you’re doing chronic pain management anesthesia?
Dr. Goree: Yeah, so very different than kind of what most medical students would probably think about anesthesiologists. So my time is split between clinic and procedure time. So about half my time is spent in an office seeing patients in a clinic. And the majority of the patients I see, because of kind of my niche, my clinical niche within chronic pain, is patients who have really severe post-surgical pain, whether that be knee replacements, hip replacements, spine surgeries, abdominal surgeries that just don’t go well. If you look at the literature about 30% of patients who have any type of surgery have chronic pain after. Surgery just, you know, and that’s why a lot of times surgeons are very cautious about who they operate on, because a lot of patients just don’t do well. And sometimes it’s really hard to predict who those people are. And so I see about 20 patients a day and have conversations with them about what I can do to improve their quality of life. Like one of the things that’s kind of interesting about our specialty that makes us unique is I think we are the only specialty, or one of the only specialties, that doesn’t treat a pathology. So almost every doctor, you know, what you learn to do in medical school is pattern recognition. You identify disease. And then you learn what the treatments are based on evidence and you provide those treatments. I see patients when medicine fails them. And so when doctors try to treat them. It doesn’t go well. And then it’s like, we don’t have a treatment for which you have. We can’t fix your pathology. So we’re gonna send you to someone who is going to try to palliate your quality of life. And that’s what I do. And so I talk to patients about how to get them moving more, how to get them sleeping more. And, and actually our intake form is something that’s called a Promise 29 which actually measures patients risk of, risk of depression, the risk of lack of movement. Their risk of lack of sleeping, etc. And we talk about all those parts of them holistically. And a big part of that is pain. And then the second half of my day, and I treat pain with both procedures, sometimes medicine, sometimes opioids. The second half of my, half of my clinical time is spent doing procedural interventions. And that’s anything from injecting something with steroids, to decrease inflammation, all the way to implanting kind of complex devices, like spinal cord stimulators, which for lack of a better explanation, are pacemakers of the spine for patients with complex chronic pain.
Hannah: Very cool!
Weijia: Very cool for sure. For our listeners, I worked with Dr. Goree, and I’ve shadowed him in the clinic before, and it is, it is nothing like the anesthesia we think of.
[Laughs]
Weijia: Yes, it’s some, I, one, something that I thought was really cool, was, one patient came in with like back pain, and all you do is you just go in with a little needle and then you just burn off the nerve, apparently, and then that gets rid of all the pain. That’s chronic pain anesthesia.
Dr. Goree: Yeah. A lot of, a lot of what we do is kind of thinking outside the box to how can we help this patient live with this condition. And if you think about it, nerves are really just highways from, from areas of our body to the brain. And if we can interrupt that highway, we can make patients better without curing their disease. So if somebody has a disease process and there’s a sensory nerve that goes to the spinal cord, then we can get rid of that sensory nerve so that they just don’t feel that area. And for patients who, unfortunately most of our nerves are mixed motor sensory and that’s where neuromodulation comes in where we use electricity to kind of change the signal so that, so that they don’t have as much pain. So we use a lot of really out of the box things and a lot of physicians don’t really know what we do. They kind of just like send patients to us, and we’re kind of the figure it out ground for patients that I often call myself, and this is probably a dated reference so I don’t expect either of you to get it. But there was a movie back in the 90s called Pulp Fiction, and there was a gentleman who they called when they had a, what I would call a snafu. And they called him basically the eraser. And that’s a little bit about what I do, when patients don’t do well, they often end up with me and we try to help them get their life back.
Hannah: Very cool! So I know Weijia was like, that was very cool to me. What is, in like, if you can talk about it, one of your most memorable, fascinating cases that you’re like, at the same time, you know, this is really cool or interesting. Keeping in mind that, you know, chronic pain in these patients’ lives, like it is very sad, but as a physician and a scientist, [yeah], this was interesting or this was something that is a very unique experience.
Dr. Goree: Yeah. I’ll try to not get overly technical. But I have.. One of the things that I specifically specialize in is the placement of dorsal root ganglion simulation. And that is the placement of an electrical lead on a nerve root as it leaves the spinal canal. And, they just aren’t a lot of physicians who learn that technique because doing it minimally invasively is relatively challenging. And opening up the spine to place it can cause other problems. So. Doing it through a needle is probably the best way to do it, but it’s a very small target. And I had a patient who unfortunately, had an injury due to a gunshot wound. And, he had severe, what we call complex regional pain syndrome, which is a disease that I have published a few times about, but… It’s a disease where you have nerve damage and your sympathetic nervous system takes over a single limb. And patients have swelling, color change, they have severe pain and there’s something called the McGill Pain Scale that McGill University in Canada actually published. And they ranked the expected amount of pain from all sorts of disease processes. And complex regional pain syndrome was actually at the top, above a childbirth without anesthesia, a traumatic amputation, all these other things that are thought of as super painful. So incredibly painful disease and this gentleman had basically stopped working, lost his job, couldn’t support his family. And we were able to do simulation for him and now, I actually see him at his job regularly, cause he works somewhere that I frequently, I frequently visit. And so it’s always rewarding to see someone who comes to you and says like my livelihood and my quality of life is gone. And then be able to see them a year later and see them happy, working. You know, is he without pain- no- but I think just the ability to be able to support his family has been my changing for him and why I do what I do. Is because, you wanna, I like the challenge of having to think outside the box because there’s really no protocol for what I do. It’s like I sit down and I’m like, what can I do to fix this person? Or make their life better. But the second is that patients are so appreciative because most times when they make it to me, they’ve been given up on by everyone else.
Weijia: That is pretty cool. It’s wow…
Hannah: It’s also really cool that you got to see that change. Like you get to follow long term because in certain specialties you don’t get that and so you just have to be like, well, I hope they’re doing well.
Dr. Goree: Yeah. We see, we see the good and the bad. Which, you’ve seen some of the good and the bad, kind of working with us. Is that, you know, we, do our best and because we’re kind of the last resort. You know, we’re not able to help everyone. But we try our best.
Weijia: So we talked a lot about, you know, the good aspect of, the fulfilling aspect of chronic pain anesthesia. What would you say is something that you don’t like as much about this field?
Dr. Goree: Yeah, that’s a good question. Cause I would say I can’t imagine being in any other field. I would say the couple of challenges, and if you ask most physicians, they would say the patient population. They would say that treating patients who have chronic pain is challenging because it’s depressing. Because you’re seeing patients who are really at their low point of life. There is a perception that there is a lot of secondary gain. So the perception that you have a lot of patients who are coming in to get opioids or coming in because they want drugs. I have found that most people honestly want help. And most patients don’t know what that help is. And most patients think that the treatment is gonna be medicine because they don’t know what the options are. And so a lot of times I end up spending time educating patients. Talking about like Well, how active are you? Like, maybe we need to get you, you know, in with a psychiatrist because you do have depression that’s untreated that’s contributing to your pain. So it’s a lot of very challenging conversations. Actually love that part of my job, cause I love talking to people. I love seeing people improve. But I think for a lot of physicians, they don’t wanna sit and talk to people for 45 min about, kind of like, what’s going on in their life and how, you know, they just got a divorce and that’s probably contributing to their situation. Or, you know, they don’t have these resources and they need a psychiatrist. Or that, you know, they’re not sleeping well because of x, y, z or talking to them about, you know, yesterday I had a patient that I basically did an intervention for because he was, you know, over doing some unsafe things with opioids. And so I would say that most people would see that as the downside. I don’t necessarily see it as that because I think that, that’s the side of medicine where I think the most work gets done. Is actually really listening to people because I think the perception of medicine is that we don’t listen. That we come in with an agenda and we try to get things done. But, it’s amazing what you can find out, and honestly you could find out that the reason that patients say that they’re there may not be the real reason that they’re there. And sometimes it just takes time to get to know them and listen to find that out.
Hannah: I think that is a reoccurring theme from some of the specialties that have a lot of patient interaction. Especially, I can’t remember who it was, but they said that eventually if you talk to your patient long enough, they will tell you what their problem is.
Dr. Goree: Mmhmm. Mmhmm. Mmhmm.
Hannah: Which seems…You’re like, oh, well, they of course they will tell you what their problem is. They’re gonna tell you that first, but we mean like they’ll actually tell you what is wrong, and you’re like, oh they know what is wrong with them, they just need someone to help. Anyways, sorry side note haha.
Weijia: So as a minority in the field of medicine, and especially I think anesthesia, what are some specific challenges that you have encountered?
Dr. Goree: Yeah, no, that’s a really good question. I think the, the main challenge is really being on the front lines and seeing the lack of equity in care. And some of that is due to location. You know, I trained in Manhattan. And so seeing the difference in access to care that patients in Manhattan have compared to patients in Arkansas is one. There, in my field, there’s probably less than 30 interventional trained chronic paid physicians in the entire state. Whereas in Manhattan, there’s probably 30 within a five block radius of where I trained. Cause there’s three large practices and then three academic practices all within this like little area. So. The access is a huge issue. But then also when you think about costs. To patients who are underinsured. And then there’s also this piece, of kind of assumptions that are made about patients. And sometimes, when patients look a certain way, we’re like, oh, they have chronic pain, we need to make sure that they get, you know, high quality chronic pain care. Whereas some patients who look a different way, we’ll say that, oh, they’re drug seeking. Or they’re just trying to get opioids. Or oh they’re just trying to like get a paper signed so they don’t have to work anymore. And seeing my referral patterns and seeing who gets referred to me. And then kind of now being on the policy side of both this hospital system and also the state. I’ve been fortunate enough that, you know, I was, for the past three years, I’ve been chair of the Opioid Stewardship Committee, which kind of drives decisions in pain management for the hospital system. Now, I’m in a different role as Chief of Staff Elect and I’ve also been an advisor to kind of the drug task force in Arkansas and to the governor when it comes to opioid policy. I’ve been able to kind of influence some of those decisions and that’s been super rewarding. One of the other challenges is that there’s, you know, we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion. Those are all three different but very important aspects of the problem. Not having a diverse room that makes these decisions. You don’t have people who necessarily can identify and see the problem. But we have to make sure that, and the problem is lack of equity of care. But the fix is that you don’t just, you need to have more than just people in the room. It has to be an inclusive room and those people have to be, other voices have to be heard and they have to be a part of the conversation. And so I’ve been very fortunate to help diversify pain medicine in Arkansas. But then also kind of be included to kind of move kind of that agenda forward and hopefully make things more equitable.
Hannah: So if we can take a little shift. So I know we’ve mentioned a couple of your research topics and your publications, but if you would tell us a little bit about some of, hmm sorry, your current research projects and if you have more than one.
Dr. Goree: Yeah.
Hannah: What you have going on, your favorite, just a couple of like, what you have going on right now.
Dr. Goree: Very hard to pick your favorite kid. I would, I would say. My research really fits into three different categories. And so first, as we discussed, I do a lot of neuromodulation. Which is the implantation of electrical devices to treat chronic pain. And a lot of the neuromodulation we do is on the cutting edge. So we are, we at UAMS, and I’m proud to say it, are one of the lead centers in your neuromodulation research nationally, if not internationally. The biggest study in neuromodulation, which is the use of spinal electrical implants to treat diabetic peripheral neuropathy. We were the lead center on that study. It was a 20 center study across the country. Places like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, you know, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, all the big centers, Duke, the, we were the core of that research. And now that is an FDA approved treatment because of that research.
Hannah: That’s really cool.
Dr. Goree: So, a lot of the work that we’re doing is actually pushing the field forward and pushing forward new indications for, kind of this cutting edge technology. And it’s based on the idea that the heart sends signals through electricity and so we use pacemakers to treat that and that’s common standard of care now. Nerves send signals to the brain through electricity. And so if we’re able to figure out how to harness that same technology, we should be able to do the same thing. And so every year, we’re getting better at it. You know, I will say, Student Doctor Shi and I are doing a project to understand how successful we’ve been in doing that over the past six years. And calling patients who’ve had various treatments and seeing how they’re doing. But we are, a lot of our kind of our bigger studies are using it for new indications. So that’s one. The second is kind of what we talked about, kind of my passion to make sure that pain care is equitable. So understanding what happens to patients when they have chronic pain. And you know, looking at whether patients are prescribed opioids after surgery, and whether there’s a difference on, based on race class and gender is something that I’ve published a fair amount on. The last is, I did a two-year fellowship in implementation science, which is the science of taking something that’s evidence-based and making it standard of care. And it’s been shown, it takes about once we prove that something’s effective, it takes about 12 years before it becomes kind of the thing that we teach in medical school. Just takes time. It takes insurance coverage has to happen. Everyone has to learn about it. Has to get written in textbooks. And then it’s like, how do we improve that process? You know, this is kind of a controversial topic, but I’ll use it because it’s very front of mind for everyone. But I think at one point it was established in medicine that COVID vaccines would prevent death. And even though that was established, we have a large percentage of the population who is unvaccinated. And there are a ton of reasons for that. It could be due to lack of access. It could be due to misinformation. It could be due to fear, distrust of the medical system, a number of things. And so implementation science is the study of how do we bridge those gaps. I have done a fair amount of work in implementation science, especially looking at the opioid epidemic because there’s a lot of things in chronic pain that we know are evidence-based. That we don’t necessarily do in practice. So how can we bring those, kind of to bear to improve patient care. So those are kind of my three buckets of things and, more than willing for anyone to work with us on any of those three topics because we always have something going.
Hannah: I would like to insert, you will be told multiple times as a medical student throughout many of your courses. That they will teach you something for the test and then they will say right after “but in practice this is probably changing in the next year, but your test won’t have this on it. So this is what you need to do for your step exam.” We’ve been told that countless times.
Dr. Goree: Yeah. And I would even say that one of the challenges of practicing medicine, and this is kind of a completely off topic, but one of the things that makes you a great doctor, that takes you from being a good doctor to a great doctor, is you do medical school and residency. And it’s very easy to go out and practice and hang a shingle somewhere and do that thing for 30 years. The great doctors are the ones who become lifelong learners. And I’ve only been out of fellowship for eight years. But there are things that I was taught in 2014 when I graduated fellowship that are completely outdated and I would never do. And I would say 30% of my practice is things that I’ve learned over the few, over the past few years where I am.. I probably do more DRG implants than anyone in the state. DRG didn’t exist until 2017 and so I had to go and travel and go to other doctors who invented the technique and learn how to do it from them so I could bring it back to Arkansas. So. Continuing to improve past medical school is I think what makes you excellent.
Weijia: I actually heard this from Dr. Mhyre and she said anesthesiologist, the –ologist is the study of something. So as anesthesiologist, your goal is to have a lifelong study, or else you’re just doing manual labor. So-
Dr. Goree: Mmhmm. It’s so true.
Hannah: So kind of taking a shift from work, what are some of your interests outside of medicine? Because as we all know, you need a healthy work-life balance. You can’t devote all of yourself to your practice or it can’t go that well… So we like to know, who our mentors are outside of the hospital.
Dr. Goree: Yeah, no, that’s-
Hannah: Helps humanize our–
Dr. Goree: Take me out of being like a robot.
Hannah and Weijia: Yes
Dr. Goree: So we’re sitting in my office right now. I have a lot of pictures of my family all around. And so I have two boys. They are eight and six. They are bundles of energy, and any day that they do not end up in the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Emergency Room, I feel like I won a prize. But I love spending time with them. And so I would say my family is definitely number one. A few other things that I randomly enjoy. I am a mixologist, so I have-
Hannah: Very cool
Dr. Goree: -like done bartending training, and I love traveling. I’m a foodie and so I love, I’m the person in the department that it’s like, I’m going to X Random City. What two restaurants should I go to? And I, I actually keep a journal of everywhere that I go and eat. And keep like a rating of what I ate there, and how good it was. That’s super nerdy-
Hannah: No, that’s sounds-
Dr. Goree: But, it comes in handy. And so I have, I travel a fair amount because of, I do a lot of speaking. I do a lot of research, etc. I actually have six trips over the next two months, but I actually have-
Hannah: Very busy!
Dr. Goree: I pretty much have a reservation at every single night at all those places I’m going. And then I would say the last thing is I’m also really interested on in the, the kind of the business side of, I would say personal finance. I actually hosted a webinar of, last night, for a international organization on how to handle finances as a physician. And so, investing, and I have an investment group of 12 friends from college, and we actually, I was just texting with them as I was coming to do this podcast, but. Doing some fun things together. But also making sure that we, we tend to invest in things that are, one, a lot of young minority investors who don’t have access to capital, but also things that we think will improve the community. So I would say those are kind of three things that I find interesting, and there are probably just sounded much more nerdy than I am. You’re probably like, wow this dude is a loser. But that’s kind of–
Hannah: No, I was like, oh my gosh, he sounds so coooool haha
Dr. Goree: Those are kind of the things I’m into. Also, love to cook. And so I am like a, I have every single cooking tool that like, my kitchen looks like Williams Sonoma.
Hannah: Every new gadget that comes out.
Dr. Goree: All of it.
Hannah: Every family member is like, “Oh, that will make a great Christmas.”
Dr. Goree: Yeah, the problem is that I normally buy it by the time you give it to me for Christmas. I just kind of come home with stuff.
Hannah: Like what you buy the person who has it all.
Dr. Goree: Like I’m gonna buy him a sous vide – hmm I bought one yesterday.
Hannah: I feel like I have that already.
Dr. Goree: Yeah, so, but a lot of these, my staff and a lot of the doctors I work with will often buy me random kitchen gadgets or random bar gadgets for Christmas and birthdays.
Hannah: They’re good, they’re good gifts.
Dr. Goree: Good gifts. They always work.
Weijia: Okay, as we’re getting to wrap up, just one final quick question. What are some advice that you would give to either med students, or students interested in anesthesia. And then for people who don’t know, chronic pain anesthesia is fairly competitive. So what are some of advice you would give to students.
Dr. Goree: Yeah, you know, I always say that, you know, the one piece of advice and, you know, a lot of this podcast is about mentors, but I would say… Networking is one of the most crucial pieces of medicine that I don’t think that we stress enough, especially in medical school. But I understand why. Because to get to the point where you’re a medical student. Normally it’s all on like stuff that you have to do. It’s like getting good grades in college, killing the MCAT. You know, doing well and it’s like improving yourself. And then eventually like this becomes a job. And I think other careers get this a little bit earlier. Because you know, if you join a multinational corporation in your, when you’re 21, like your test scores no longer matter once you get that job. Like then it becomes about like performing well. Doing your job well and then getting to know people and really showing yourself, showing your talent. And so I would say for medical students really take advantage of the fact that you’re at a hospital system where there are, you know, state, statewide known nationally known, internationally known physicians. And a lot of them are really willing to talk about their interests and they’re often excited when there’s a medical student who’s like jazzed about like some weird thing that they like, whether it be like restaurants or neuromodulation, which are two things that I get jazzed about. And so I can talk for hours about those things. And love it when students are excited about those things. To give a a tangible example of that. When I was, I would say this was, trying to count the dates back. So I guess it would be like six years ago. There was a young medical student, a UAMS medical student who was an M3. Who came to my office exactly where we’re sitting right now. And wanted to like hear more about chronic pain. And then he decided to go into anesthesiology and I became his subspecialty advisor. And wrote his recommendation for residency, and then he ended up leaving Arkansas, and he did an anesthesiology residency at Ochsner, and then he was a chief resident at Ochsner. And then now, he is my chronic pain fellow. And so I literally just did 12 procedures with him yesterday. And he was on this international webinar with me talking about, you know what he was thinking, as a resident about personal finance. And so I say all that to say that the world is just so small, especially when you get into these subspecialties. And just getting to know people can really kind of potentially change your trajectory, and you can also learn whether you like a specialty or not. Because you kind of, we all in medical school through rotations have a rough idea what a specialty looks like. But I don’t think you really understand it till you talk to people about what their job is, shadow them. And honestly, see how happy they are. Because I crossed a lot of things off my list by hanging out with doctors and being like, you don’t look happy. And this since- tends to be a trend of all of you don’t look happy. And that kind of helped me to understand what I wanted to do. And so anesthesiologists to me looked happy, and I enjoyed being around them. But then, like the people who are the most happy of the anesthesiologists were the pain people. It’s probably why all the anesthesiologists hate on the pain people, because we’re all so happy and we’re like running around in our suits and we like look so pretty. We’re always called the “pretty boys of anesthesiology” or the “pretty ladies of anesthesia.” But, I just think it’s a field that I love and my mentors from Cornell, where I went to medical school and did residency, are some of my best friends now. And I see them at meetings, I’m on panels with them and stuff like that. So you never know how this stuff comes full circle. And that. In the same way that me getting to know Trevor, Trevor Johnson, who’s our fellow who’s a UAMS alum. You know, I got to know, you know, Amit Gulati, and Neel Mehta, who are the Directors of Pain at Cornell, and I got to know them when I was a M2 and M3. And now, you know, they’re calling me like, hey, we gotta go to New York or we have to go to San Francisco and like give a talk together. So. It just all comes full circle. Those relationships really matter.
Hannah: So if a student wishes to contact you, either to be their mentor, for shadowing, research, whatever it may be. What is the best way, or your preferred way of contact:
Dr. Goree: Yeah, just reach out to me my email. I’m in, I’m in the Outlook system, JHGoree, Johnathan Goree. JHGoree is my email- @uams.edu. If you’re interested in kind of seeing what my life is like or hearing more about a lot of the things I ripped about, I am pretty active on Twitter. So, DrJGoree is my Twitter handle. And so I often talk about chronic pain and equity issues and chronic pain. A lot of my research and a lot of things I’m working on. And the chronic pain Twitter world is like a buzz all the time. Like it’s, for whatever reason, our specialty, we’re all on Twitter and we all tweet like crazy. So if you’re interested in chronic pain, jump on Twitter and start like liking some people and, you, some of the biggest names in the history of pain will follow you because we’re a really young specialty. So just, a random thought. But those are the two ways to get in contact with me.
Hannah: Very cool.
Weijia: Email and Twitter.
Dr. Goree: Email and twitter!
Hannah: Listeners, if you have any questions, thoughts, concerns, hopes, dreams that you would like us to know about, you can contact us. And we would love to hear it.
Weijia: And that’s the end.