Spine Pain With Dr. Vernon Williams

Spine pain is one of the most common presenting concerns in health care settings. It is important for neurologists to understand strategies for evaluating and managing patients with spine pain.

In this episode, Katie Grouse, MD, FAAN, speaks with Vernon B. Williams, MD, FAAN, author of the article “Spine Pain,” in the Continuum October 2024 Pain Management in Neurology issue.

Dr. Grouse is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a clinical assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco in San Francisco, California.

Dr. Williams is the director of the Center for Sports Neurology and Pain Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles, California.

Additional Resources

Read the article: Spine Pain

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Social Media

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@ContinuumAAN

Guest: @VernWilliamsMD

Transcript

Full episode transcript available here

Dr Jones: This is Dr Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum, the premier topic-based neurology clinical review and CME journal from the American Academy of Neurology. Thank you for joining us on Continuum Audio, which features conversations with Continuum's guest editors and authors who are the leading experts in their fields. Subscribers to the Continuum Journal can read the full article or listen to verbatim recordings of the article and have access to exclusive interviews not featured on the podcast. Please visit the link in the episode notes for more information on the article, subscribing to the journal, and how to get CME.

Dr Grouse: This is Dr Katie Grouse. Today I'm interviewing Dr Vernon Williams about his article on spine pain, which appears in the October 2024 Continuum issue on pain management in neurology. Welcome to the podcast, and please introduce yourself to our audience. 

Dr Williams: Oh, well, thanks for having me. My name is Vernon Williams and I'm a neurologist here in Southern California.

Dr Grouse: So, I want to start off today by asking, what do you feel is the key message from your article?

Dr Williams: So, I think the key message is that we want to make sure people understand that there's really a distinction between abnormal imaging, tissue damage, nociception, and this experience of spine pain. So, the concept is that nociception is different from the clinical experience of pain; nociception, meaning the electrical signaling from these, quote unquote, pain generators and that kind of thing. But it's really an incomplete framing. We really want people to understand that the experience of pain is colored by a number of other things, things like genetics, biochemical factors, behavior and psychological factors, social factors, those kinds of things. So that's one of the big messages, this distinction between nociception and this clinical experience of pain. 

Dr Grouse: Why do you think it's important for neurology clinicians to read this article?

Dr Williams: Well, I think, you know, for one thing, spine pain is very