Everything Old Is New Again: Introducing Integrative Medicine to the Pediatric Perioperative Arena

I am an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and an attending pediatric anesthesiologist at the Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester NY. I am also an ABOIM certified Integrative Medicine Physician, and graduate of the AIHM Fellowship program (Cohort 5). I am also a member of the Section of Integrative Medicine of the American Academy of Pediatrics, where I am the communications committee cochair. I completed a joint MD/PhD program at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I had the opportunity to observe and participate in a well-developed integrative medicine program in an academic children’s hospital. This experience was my first with in-hospital integrative medicine, and left a lasting impression of the important connection between development, emotions, physiology, and healing in children and adolescents.

My current research interests involve the effects that the stressors of the perioperative period have on children and adolescent patients undergoing elective surgery. I am particularly interested in how these patients rate the effects of these stressors on their physical feelings of pain, nausea, vomiting and anxiety during these experiences and have created a novel clinical program centering to teach older children and adolescents integrative and complementary techniques that they can use to better manage these stressors not only during the challenges of surgery, but also at any stressful time in their future lives.

During a time when emphasis on the patient experience is more important than ever, and the avoidance of opioids is becoming more and more desirable, it is critical to expand our quiver of techniques to include Integrative Medicine in the perioperative arena. My overarching goal is to expand the scope of what is currently done to prepare children for surgery, and to teach our patients how to achieve physiologic self-regulation so their surgical experiences can be less challenging, less stressful, and less disruptive to their lives.