Membership
APS Member Spotlight
Featured in the May 2011 Issue of ENews
Knox H. Todd, MD MPH
Professor and Chair, Department of Emergency Medicine
MD Anderson Cancer Center
What is your area of specialty?
I'm an emergency physician with a career interest in pain management and palliative care.
What initially sparked your interest in working in your field? Briefly describe your career path.
During my first residency (I was a slow learner—it took two), a gentleman of forty collapsed in front of my hospital. As it turned out, he collapsed from the pain of two rib fractures after having been discharged from our emergency department. After escorting him back inside, his treating trauma surgeons had to be convinced that he deserved their emergent attention, despite the fact that he did not require a surgical intervention. This disconnect between a basic patient need and physician perception was striking and drove my career interests.
What has been a highlight of your work? Perhaps you and your staff are proud of a certain project or accomplishment.
I've always been interested in cross-cultural medicine, and our team was the first to report ethnic disparities in the treatment of pain. While we are proud of these efforts, I am disappointed by our lack of progress in changing practice in this area. There is always more work to do.
Is there a particular challenge that you've either overcome or hope to address soon?
We've worked to increase communications between the pain and emergency medicine communities, and again this is a work in progress. Increasingly, emergency physicians are pursuing advanced training in pain medicine and palliative care, and I feel this trend will continue. Many pain medicine fellowship programs are now accepting emergency physicians into their programs, and this cross fertilization is a great thing for our patients.
Who is your favorite role model and why?
There are so many within APS. I joined over a decade ago after bringing four of my emergency medicine colleagues to the Vienna IASP meeting where Chris Miaskowski challenged me to join the organization. Rich Payne, Charlie Cleeland, and Russ Portenoy (among many others) have become my mentors and friends over the years.
How has membership in APS been of value to you and your professional development?
I've worked at the interface of emergency medicine and pain medicine for more than a decade now, and the multidisciplinary nature of APS provides members of my primary specialty a broad window into pain medicine. APS has been invaluable to my professional development, providing a rich network of mentors and contacts that have certainly enriched my life, as well as my career.
