Happy New Year

As you read this issue of the ASRA News, it may be a bit late for happy New Year wishes since January is over; however, I hope everyone had a fantastic New Year and enjoyed the festive holiday season. I also hope that you did all that you wished to do in 2016 and that 2017 will bring joy, happiness, and success to you and your families.

This issue ushers in the upcoming transition of ASRA leadership from Dr de Leon-Casasola to Dr Buvanendran in the spring. Both leaders embrace the values of public service, advocacy, and advancing the ASRA mission of leading the fields of acute and chronic pain through education and research. I can attest that this is true for all members of the board of directors and the organization leadership. Thank you, Oscar, for your leadership and mentorship. Kumar, I am looking forward to working with you.

I am very proud of this issue of the ASRA News as it features three articles from the Residents and Fellows component of the society. These articles reflect a wide range of interests, from global outreach to practice organization and use of the electronic medical record, and, finally, to use of acupuncture as a modality of alternative complementary medicine. These articles were done in collaboration with faculty from the acute and chronic pain sections of various institutions. We adopted this mentorship model in the ASRA News, as we believe it fosters the development of a new generation of ASRA leaders.

Point-of-care ultrasound (PoCUS) is making its way into mainstream practice of ultrasound slowly but surely. The University of Toronto group presents to you a step-by-step guide to gastric US scanning to rule out full stomach in relevant clinical context. We continue that trend in the ASRA News after we featured the PoCUS special interest group in the previous issue. This article as well others will be filed under the educational resource section of the ASRA website.

In this issue of the newsletter, we take you around the world from the Hunan province in China to Ambon, Indonesia, and back to San Francisco where regional anesthesia and pain medicine touch people’s lives in different ways.

After reading the newsletter articles, I learned about pain practice in China and about the value of regional anesthesia in a humanitarian mission in Indonesia. I was reminded of the fantastic program that ASRA has in store during the spring meeting in San Francisco. I am excited about this meeting and looking forward to it. I hope to see you there.

In this issue, we also discuss the latest advances in pain medicine from radiofrequency ablation of tumor metastasis to the spine to acupuncture to the use of ketamine for acute postoperative pain.

Have you ever wondered about veterinary medicine and the role of regional anesthesia and acute pain? Drs Schroeder, Hornickle, and Keller give us a flavor of what they do on a day-to-day basis in their practice.

This is not everything we bring to you, but you have to read it all to learn it all.