Dr. Bunty Shah is an academic Pain Medicine Physician at Penn State. He completed his residency training in Anesthesiology. He shares the specialty with us.
Back in Episode 17, we interviewed a community-based pain medicine doc who came from a radiology background. So you get to hear some differences between these two episodes.
Bunty has been out of fellowship training now for two years. He now serves as the Associate Program Director for the Fellowship at Penn State.
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When he was in his surgery rotation in medical school in his third year, there was no actual anesthesiology rotation. But it was built into the surgery rotation. It was by chance that he actually encountered anesthesia during his surgery rotation. He met an anesthesiologist during third year rotation in medical school. He learned that anesthesiology was all about an interplay between physiology and basic sciences. It was very procedure-oriented and he enjoyed it. That was his first experience with anesthesia. And so he decided to pursue that.
He also wanted to do emergency medicine initially being formerly an EMT. He thought emergency medicine was very exciting. He still thinks it is but the finds anesthesia to have combined all the different specialties he was interested in. He could be a cardiologist, a nephrologist, an ICU doctor, and all these things at once in the operating room.
As far as pain medicine goes, he didn't know anything about it back in medical school. It was a subspecialty so he didn't have much exposure to it as a medical student. It wasn't until his CA two year being his third year of anesthesiology as a resident. He rotated through the pain management clinic and he saw all the different procedures done for pain of different causes. It married what he likes about anesthesia which is procedures. A lot of the procedures they do in anesthesia are carried over to pain medicine such as skills when doing epidural injections. So this gravitated him towards the pain medicine.
Another thing he liked about pain medicine that was missing when he was doing anesthesia was having more face-to-face time with patients while they're awake and talking with him. The other thing about anesthesia was he would do a case and take of a patient for one surgical procedure and not see them again. He considers this as a good thing in the grand scheme of things. Because it means they improved or did well.
"I like the continuity of care I get with some of my patients in pain medicine and establish relationships that is more long-lasting."
Again, it's the patient interaction along with the procedures that led him to pursuing a career in pain medicine.
Bunty says you have inherent coordination skills to be able to do these procedures but you do learn by practicing. So the things that to some degree, it can be taught. But the most important thing to be masterful with procedures is understanding your limitations. You have to develop an overall sense of safety, knowing when you can advance a needle, and when you have to be a little bit more cautious. You have to understand the relevant anatomy. He recommends to medical students and residents that knowing your functional anatomy is very important to doing procedures.
"Knowing your functional anatomy is very important to doing procedures."
Bunty adds that your knowledge of the anatomy is your road map for doing a procedure. Aside from having dexterity and manual skills, your knowledge of the anatomy is a major factor in making sure you can do a safe procedure for a...