December 2019

What do a family doctor, a hospital-based pharmacist, a handful of Dalhousie health researchers, and a Nova Scotian who has experience with opioids for chronic pain, have in common? They all want patients with chronic, severe non-cancer pain to receive the optimal treatment for their pain. But first they need to learn more about who is receiving opioids for their pain, and how they are doing with this treatment. To get to the bottom of this, they need to examine the patterns of how opioids are prescribed in family practice in Nova Scotia.

It all started in January 2019 when long-time Dalhousie Medicine New Brunswick (DMNB) faculty member, Dr. Sarah Gander, had an idea about how to reach those struggling to find the time to attend a faculty development session: a podcast.

Dr. Alon Friedman of Dalhousie’s Brain Repair Centre, and his research partners at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, and University of California, Berkley, have published two papers in the journal Science Translational Medicine detailing new MRI and EEG techniques to identify blood-brain barrier leaks, as well as a novel treatment that not only helps to alleviate the effects of a leaky blood-brain barrier, but seems to also heal the barrier.