A group of Campbell University student doctors and a resident traveled to Las Vegas to present their work and to learn more about pain management.
The week of learning, PAINWeek 2026, is one of the nation’s premier interdisciplinary pain management conferences, says Dr. Robert Agnello, chair of Family Medicine.
The conference, held Sept. 8-11, brings together healthcare professionals, researchers, trainees and industry leaders to share advances in pain medicine, opioid stewardship, integrative therapies and emerging research, Agnello says.
“In addition to attending nationally recognized educational sessions, our students and resident had the opportunity to present scholarly work and engage directly with experts from around the country.”
Another resident, Dr. Terence Tsang, is a Campbell med school graduate who is working at Riverside Health in California.
Here’s a list of the student doctors and residents who attended and their presentations:
- Fourth-year student Dr. Mariah Helms – “Considering Hormonal Replacement Therapy for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome: A Narrative Review and Illustrative Case”
- Fourth-year student Dr. Kyle Agostini – “Chronic Pain as a Precision-Weighting Disorder: A Predictive-Processing Framework and Open–Shape–Stabilize Hypothesis”
- Agostini and third-year student Dr. Tyler Palfreeman – “Pain-Domain Narratives Report the Most Favorable Outcomes: A Descriptive Corpus Analysis of Patient-Reported Off-Label Low-Dose Naltrexone Use Across Fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Long COVID and General Pain
- Third-year student Dr. William “Kyle” Sadler and second-year student Dr. Barkley Browder – “De-Stress Pain Management: Rethinking Opioid and Nonopioid Therapies – Program Evaluation Outcomes Based on REMS Blueprint Requirements”
- Third-year student Dr. Roxton Edwards – “Early County-Level Associations Between Opioid Settlement Spending and Overdose Outcomes in North Carolina”
- Dr. Terence Tsang, a Campbell med graduate and resident, presented “Viva Las Vertebrae: The Case for Prolotherapy in Refractory Cervical Pain.”
- Dr. Daniel Vanrooyen, Family Medicine resident and Campbell med graduate, presented an accepted scholarly poster.
Edwards was drawn to pain medicine, in part, because of how the opioid epidemic is affecting the local community.
“I grew up near Dobson, North Carolina, and remember during my childhood hearing how prevalent and massive the opioid crisis was in our little rural town,” Edwards says.
As an undergrad, Edwards completed a research project that analyzed different socioeconomic factors in North Carolina that may play a role in opioid overdose deaths.
“With my most recent research looking at how spending is being allocated in North Carolina, I feel that this research is greatly needed to continue to help the state and local communities heal from the damage it has done,” Edwards says.
“PAINWeek was a great experience that allowed me to collaborate with different specialities around the country and share my findings. Being able to learn about new innovations in pain management helps me bring this knowledge back to North Carolina and share it with my fellow colleagues.”
Agostini says he’s interested in understanding the heterogeneity of patients’ experiences and presentations of pain so that care can be more precisely personalized. The two posters he presented during PainWeek 2026 approached this challenge from different angles.
One presentation, he says, is based on a theoretical paper currently under review proposing a new mechanistic interpretation of chronic pain, with the broader goal of linking subjective pain experiences to plausible objective biomarkers.
“The other showcased a novel methodology developed to sample and qualitatively organize individual testimonials from social media, allowing us to characterize how patients describe the perceived benefits of low-dose naltrexone across different chronic pain and related conditions.
“We are now working to apply this methodology to other treatment modalities. Overall, PAINWeek gave me the opportunity to have many thoughtful conversations with clinicians, researchers and industry specialists working at the frontiers of pain treatment. Those discussions helped refine my thinking and will continue to shape the direction of my future research.”
PAINWeek, Agnello says, provided students and residents with an exceptional opportunity to showcase their scholarship on a national stage while learning from leaders across the field of pain medicine.
“Their presentations reflected the depth of research, curiosity and commitment to improving patient care that we strive to cultivate at the Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine, and I could not be more proud of how they represented our institution.”
