Michael Erdek, MD, MA

• Associate Professor
  Berman Institute of Bioethics
• Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and of Oncology
  Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Michael Erdek, MD, MA, is Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and Oncology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Erdek received his undergraduate medical education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Walter Lewis Croll Scholar. He trained in Surgery and in Anesthesiology prior to completing his subspecialty training in Pain Medicine and then Critical Care Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Erdek has published and lectured extensively in the field of Pain Medicine, is a member of the editorial boards for several journals in the field of Pain Medicine, and has lectured internationally and nationally at multiple conferences.

His clinical interests center on the assessment and interventional treatment of cancer pain and the use of neuromodulation therapy to treat refractory conditions of spasticity, neuropathic pain, and advanced vascular disease.

His work has close association with Bioethics in a number of areas. Treatment of cancer pain and provision of palliative care often involves questions of quality of life and resource utilization in the terminally ill. Additionally, there is a clear overlap between the current well-publicized opioid crisis and the ethics of safe, appropriate, and societally responsible treatment of pain.