Chronic Pain Institute

Researchers Background

August L. Stemmer, MD, DMD, FACS

University of the Pacific, Clinical Faculty

President and Chief Executive Officer of The Chronic Pain Institute

Received both of his doctorate degrees from Harvard Dental and Medical School respectively. He has had many years of experience in treating a wide range of chronic pain patients including those that required him to do extensive major Head and Neck cancer resections in the past. He teaches and does chronic pain research in his capacity as Clinical Associate Professor at the University of the Pacific and is an Alumnus of the California Pacific Medical Center having held Active Staff appointments both there and at the Children's Hospital of San Francisco in Otolaryngology Maxillofacial Surgery for many years.

Dr. Stemmer's interests in research started early in life when he undertook to study skin antigenicity in rabbits during his under graduate Organic Chemistry training in Miami University of Oxford Ohio where he found extra time to become the Freshman Class President his first year. This interest continued into the completion of his first year at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine when he received the School's Research Award for some of the earliest work with hyaluronidase, the hyaluronic acid splitting enzyme, which the Wyeth Laboratories later popularized. His interest in that substance continued even after graduation from Dentistry and Medicine at Harvard into his clinical practice as a Board Certified Otolaryngologist where he informally found that he could hasten the resolution of facial nerve paralysis in the Bell's Palsy patients of his private practice by injections of the medication at the stylomastoid foramen. Later like the many others who followed him, after he was among the first 100 of the Society of Maxillofacial Surgeons in being proposed by Varstadt Kazanjian its founding father, he used the same principles with similar substances to manage the major complications which had hampered the reduction of complex facial fractures from traumatic tissue edema which had compromised his earlier surgical results as well as those of his colleagues.

It was in his early clinical work during his private practice, well before he became the Chairman and Director of the Northwestern University Clinical Service in Chicago's Cook County Hospital performing major Head and Neck trauma and cancer surgery and more, again recently, in his position as Chief of the Ear Nose and Throat Department at the major military hospital for the European Theater in his capacity as a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Medical Corps -where he continued to work with many chronic pain patients on a day to day basis, thereby coming to understand the need for an organized approach for developing a concerted method in dealing with this human plight. Consequently he established and then founded The Chronic Pain Institute with his associates who are also Directors of the Institute and who share the common understanding that more facilitation is needed in the form of this web site, of The Chronic Pain Institute, in order to involve all researchers in intercommunication rather than simply applying financial support which most Foundations attempt to do through their grant money alone.

Presently he is interested in the psychology of the chronicity of pain particularly in establishing its structural relationships in the brain. Together with Dr. Stephen Bunker they are using such cranial imaging techniques as SPECT, PET and Functional MRI scanning to study and better define its meaning. His research presently is at the basic science level of developing a better understanding of pain perception as demonstrated in his recent publication in the Electronic Journal of The Chronic Pain Institute where he shows that the first step in such an understanding must be to establish the degree of consistency in a given subject's responses.

*Do you know someone with chronic pain or interested in the subject, but who may not be 'on line' yet? Why not print and send them a copy of this page?

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