05MD
Amber Brooks’ career is guided by two passions: serving patients living with chronic and complex pain and advocating for compassionate, quality care for all. The first physician in her family, Brooks is an associate professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and, as of August of this year, serves as vice dean for strategic initiatives.
She specializes in outpatient treatment of chronic pain. Through her close, long-term relationships with her patients, she has gained firsthand experience with the national opioid crisis.
“When I first started at Wake Forest, the evidence was mounting that physicians were part of the issue in terms of the supply of prescription opioids," Brooks says. She also observed that older adults with chronic pain had more limited options for pain management due to health factors and higher susceptibility to side effects.
To address these gaps, Brooks participated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Butler-Williams Scholars Program, where she learned the foundation of conducting research with aging populations. In collaboration with colleagues in Wake Forest’s Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, she launched an NIH-funded pilot project: Mobile Intervention to Reduce Pain and Improve Health (MORPH) in Older Adults with Obesity.
“If we have an older adult, and they sit all day because they hurt, it becomes this vicious cycle of stiffness, pain, obesity, and pain medication use,” Brooks says. "Our dream was to help older adults break out of that cycle.”
Through her clinical research, she has cast light on bias and stigma in pain medicine and the healing power of alternative pain modalities, such as movement, acupuncture, and massage.
"Unfortunately, people with chronic pain are subject to a lot of biases and stigma,” Brooks says. “Unlike something like diabetes, where you do a blood test and know the diagnosis, there is no test for chronic pain in many cases. The patient’s treatment may ultimately depend on whether the physician believes them.”
She emphasizes the importance of listening to the lived experiences of patients to her mentees and medical trainees and training them to recognize and mitigate unconscious bias. As her department’s vice chair of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, Brooks led efforts at Wake Forest to build health equity into the curriculum for medical learners.
“Students were demanding to know about the social determinants of health that contribute to health inequities,” she says.
Her next goal is to fund a program to train students from diverse backgrounds in modern methods of data science as a means of driving innovation in the field of addiction medicine.
“If we are a health care system that really wants to honor our Hippocratic Oath, then we should be creating teams with a variety of different backgrounds and perspectives,” Brooks says. “We went into medicine because we wanted to provide excellent care for all patients, and we want to try our best to avoid harm. There's no better way to do that than to have a group of teammates from all walks of life put their heads together and come up with the best treatments.”