Rodney Gabriel

Join us for a Virtual Open House for the Regional Anesthesia & Acute Pain Medicine Fellowship at UC San Diego. #nerveblock #anesthesia #regionalanesthesia #acutepain #anesthesiology

Our January UCSD Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain course is coming together, and we’re excited to welcome this year’s learners. If you’re interested in attending, send us a message for a discount code. We look forward to seeing you in January.@RodneyGabrielMD @UCSDAnes

Especially as the population ages, we need smarter pathways to address #ChronicPain without increasing harm. #OpioidCrisis

Our approach to pain in older adults often stalls at prescription, but management must be dynamic and rooted in regular assessment, personalization, and alternatives to long-term opioids.

Unfortunately, we're seeing a dramatic rise in opioid-related overdose and disorder in older adults. Between 2000 and 2020, the rate of deaths from synthetic opioids rose 14-fold in this population. The causes are complex, but one thing is clear: painmedicinenews.com/Clinical-Pain-…

@Anaes_Journal @HouthoffKavita We need to fine tune defining ASA 3s. Maybe break it up into different levels of severity

Do we need the ASA physical status classification system anymore? #anaesthesia doi.org/10.1111/anae.7…

Chronic pain isn’t always about structural damage. 🧠 Central sensitisation reshapes the nervous system, amplifying pain signals for a long time.
Explore the mechanisms behind this phenomenon in #BJAEd: bjaed.org/article/S2058-…

We often talk about multimodal analgesia in terms of medications—and don't get me wrong, medications still can play a key role in healing for many—but this shows how multimodal communication can be just as powerful.

In a recent study of over 10,000 outpatient surgeries, simply combining standardized non-opioid protocols with proactive education nearly halved chronic opioid use. There was no novel molecule. There was no complex tech. It was just consistent messaging and clear expectations.

I really enjoyed this piece's emphasis on a vastly overlooked tool in reducing opioid addiction risk: Clear #PatientEducation. medscape.com/viewarticle/op…

If AI is to be a meaningful part of care, we have to make it reliable for everyone, from clinicians to patients and beyond. Efficiency is easy to measure. Equity isn’t. Both are equally as important.

We're seeing a pretty common pattern with AI adoption: new tech enters the system, fixes some problems, and goes on to create and/or exacerbate others.

We're not asking anymore whether or not #AI has potential to do good in #healthcare. It clearly does. I think the bigger question now isn't how to achieve even more great things. It should be how to start preventing the bad. hcinnovationgroup.com/analytics-ai/a…

Will we learn from past mistakes in opioid over-prescription, or just replace one crutch with another? Innovation is necessary. Structural change is non-negotiable.

But the science is only part of the story. There are still a lot of bigger questions to consider. Will #healthcare systems adopt it equitably? Will we address cost, access, and patient education?

Really fascinating development here. By selectively blocking α2B-adrenoceptors to elevate noradrenaline and activate pain-suppressing α2A pathways, researchers may have sidestepped two decades of pharmacological dead ends in non-opioid pain relief. news-medical.net/news/20250804/…

We can build AI tools that support ethical, equitable care, but not if we ignore the current potential dangers.

What this tells me is that #LLMs can't be relied on to make ethical decisions. They’re pattern-matchers, and without human oversight, pattern-matching in medicine can quickly turn into misjudgment. Humans are nuanced, and that nuance is often hard to catch.

Such invaluable takeaways from this study. It does a great job demonstrating something many in #informatics already deal with: Just because an #AI model sounds confident doesn't mean it's making the right call. sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/…