INTERVIEW WITH BRETT ARMSTRONG, COM '22
Brett Armstrong, COM ‘22 is a second-year COM student. This fall he participated in the Care for the Underserved Pathways (CUPS) AHEC Scholars Program, an honors distinction whose mission is to increase students’ interdisciplinary competencies in rural health. As part of the program, Student Doctor Armstrong participated in the Mercy Pain Clinic, and also attended a lecture by Gordon Smith, Esq. on the state of opioids in Maine.
How did you become involved in the IPEC poster session this fall?
Through the CUP AHEC Scholars program, we needed to do a team immersion and I decided to go with the Mercy Pain Clinic. It’s an interdisciplinary team: myself, a first year medical student, OT, PT, nursing and social work. We worked with one of the doctors there, Dr. Stephen Hull, who runs their pain clinic. We
were assigned one patient, and there were three different patient appointments that team members could attend. We would essentially come up with an initial strategy, and then after each visit we would develop a plan for treatments, with Dr. Hull’s experience to help guide us. The poster presentation was a culmination of that experience. We had a poster and I helped out with the skit that we did. [The skit] was a somewhat fictional patient appointment, even though there are certainly aspects that were taken from the general experiences we had with our patient... and how someone who's experiencing chronic pain has so many different perspectives that need to be addressed.
How did the skit come about?
We had too big of a group to just do one poster. Dr. Cao is actually our advisor for this program, so she advised doing one poster and then doing something else, whatever that may be. Dr. Hull and she brought the idea of a skit that was done in the past, but they hadn't really done this version of it before. I ended up being the narrator. All the other students on my team used their professions’ perspective to show how they would go about a specific appointment. We had two PT students, so one of them was the patient.
What do you think the audience took away from the skit presentation?
I think how comprehensive the medical care and the overall healthcare of a person experiencing chronic pain needs to be. A lot of people who see chronic pain may think of just the medical perspective, and I think now there's much more awareness that opioids are not the answer. I think people have moved beyond opioids, but, whatever the chronic pain is, from an old fracture, from psychological harm, they think a couple appointments and they should feel no chronic pain afterwards or it should be diminished. The reality is it's so multifactorial: that's why you need all these different perspectives. It goes well beyond just what is done for each of those professions. It really is long term care.
In the past, patient compliance has been an issue. Did you run into any of that?
Not with our patient. With the first appointment, each profession recommended something different. We came up with all these plans at the meeting and I remember Dr. Hull was very enthusiastic about what we were saying but he also said recognize that this is a person who has a life and each profession recommending something different… means multiple appointments. It was good to have that realization. Amazingly, [the patient] took all of our suggestions, and went to all these appointments. We continue to follow up every now and again, and the patient seems to continue with it.