Nicholas Bremer is the Director-at-Large of the West Virginia Society of Interventional Pain Physicians. After serving as Navy Flight Surgeon, he completed a fellowship in Interventional Pain Medicine at Columbia University. Following graduation, began working at the world-renowned Center for Pain Relief in Charleston, West Virginia, where he currently practices. In his short tenure there, Dr. Bremer has become the Director of Implantable Therapies and Director of Pain Medicine at a nearby academically-affiliated hospital.
Dr. Bremer has published extensively in numerous pain journals and textbooks. His work includes not only articles on traditional pain topics of neuromodulation, radiofrequency ablation, epidural steroid injections, opioid-induced hyperalgesia, and the current opioid epidemic, but risk assessment, venous air embolism, and aortic valve replacement. He is also an investigator in multiple ongoing clinical trials in anesthesiology and pain Medicine. He has recently been appointed as a first review editor for the journal Neuromodulation.
As a physician with an aviation background, Dr. Bremer sees the similarities between anesthesia and aviation. Every patient deserves his or her own individualized anesthetic plan, just as every flight plan must be tailor-made to the plane, passenger, and flight conditions. The best anesthesiologists, just like the best pilots, can combine knowledge of basic science with careful assessment of clinical evidence and existing safe practice to make a plan, one that must continually be adapted to rapidly changing scenarios. Preparing for the Boards is preparing for clinical practice, and the more Consultant-like we can be in that process, the better our chances of passing and safer our patient care.
