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“The establishment of a cancer pain management program is a critically important enhancement to the comprehensive pain management services already provided at the Sackler Center for Pain Management,” said Dr. Gary Kalan, director of the anesthesiology department.
Huang meets with patients at the Smilow Cancer Hospital at the Greenwich Hospital Campus.
“Half of all cancer patients have pain at the time of diagnosis and another third can experience pain during therapy,” she said. “Sixty to 90 percent of people with advanced cancer will report having some form of pain.”
Advances in interventional cancer pain management use imaging to intercept pain at its source. Options for treating pain include single interventions (medication or numbing agents injected directly into the source of pain), neurolysis and/or radiofrequency ablation, and continuous interventions such as implanted devices for continuous delivery of medication.
“Proper pain management can boost an individual’s immune system, ward off infection and potentially limit cancer progression while reducing the need for narcotic pain medication. Most importantly, controlling pain allows patients to continue their treatment plan – whether it’s chemotherapy, radiation therapy or surgery – to improve their overall prognosis while restoring and maintaining a quality of life,” said Huang.
Integral to Huang’s practice are cutting edge pain treatments, including minimally invasive fluoroscopic and ultrasound-guided treatments to improve quality of life and reduce cancer-related pain for a broad range of cancers.
Huang’s passion for cancer pain arose from a combination of her clinical expertise and years of translational research during college and through the Medical Scientist M.D, Ph.D. Training Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She earned her medical degree with letters of distinction and has published several studies regarding cancer genomics and targeted kinase drug discovery for variety of cancers.
She completed her anesthesiology residency at John Hopkins Hospital and her interventional pain management fellowship at Harvard Medical School – Brigham and Women’s Hospital, while serving as chair of the Fellows and Residents Section Committee for the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine.
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