Lack of procedures prior to fellowship

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Nonphysiologic

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Anyone else not have much procedure experience prior to pain fellowship? How'd you hold up? Im going to hit up the flouro suite in the next coming months with the current fellows and get a feel for things and maybe go to a cadaver lab nearby and get a feel for the anatomy. Any other suggestions?

Honestly at my institution the fellows were always hogging the procedures during my pain elective so I didn't do many procedures. Furthermore neurology residency is not procedure heavy.

I did however grow up a video game fanatic! I heard that helps???

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I showed up day 1 for fellowship only having done a few epidural steroid injections and nothing else. I had pretty much no concept of the technical details of any of the procedures I would learn. It wasn't an obstacle.
 
if you are doing a good fellowship i honestly think the less bad habits you acquired prior to fellowship the better.
if you want to get to work now, i suggest becoming proficient at reading MS spine MRI. you might start with the NASS online courses. or see if you can sit in on MRI reading with radiologists. (only if they are willing to teach).
getting good at procedures will take about 10,000 hours. you will not be really good at them until you have been out of your fellowship for years. no need to rush. the video games do help, but more important is that you like to spend hours of time
staring at a screen and moving your hand. make sure you develop some people skills however.
 
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Start learning about radiation safety, how to optimize a fluoro image and anatomy and bony landmarks. Read briefly on how to manage contrast reactions. The actual maneuvering of the needle is the easy part. Knowing exactly what you are looking at and being safe about it is much harder (and arguably more important).
 
ASIPP and SIS cadaver courses are pretty inexpensive for fellows, and you get to learn from experts outside your institution and do a bunch of procedures without anyone grabbing the needle from you. I highly recommend it if you can afford it. Also reading a good pain textbook so you know all the unexciting but essential stuff about indications, complications, etc.

I also agree with the recommendations for learning spine anatomy and neuroradiology. If they have "Spine Rounds" at your institution, that can be a great way to see a lot of images and expert discussion of spinal pathology, too.
 
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