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Joshua Philip Prager MD MS is an American physician. Dr. Prager specializes in pain medicine. He is a past president of the North American Neuromodulation Society.[1][2] and serves as Senior Advisor to the Executive Board of the society. He is Chair of the Pain and the Sympathetic Nervous system (PSNS) Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Group of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP).[3] He serves on the Board of Directors of the International Neuromodulation Society (INS). He was founder and is the immediate-past-chair of the Neuromodulation Therapy Access Coalition (NTAC), a coalition of national and international physician organizations and other stakeholders dedicated to insuring patient access to neuromodulation.
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After undergraduate and graduate studies in New York and Harvard where he served as the President of the Harvard Graduate Student Council, Dr. Prager graduated from Stanford University with M.D. as well as M.S. in Management/Health Services Research in 1981. He completed training in internal medicine at UCLA before completing training in anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) at Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine. He has served on the full time faculty at MGH at Harvard Medical School and at UCLA School of Medicine where he served as Director of the UCLA Pain Medicine Center. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine.
Dr. Prager has authored numerous scientific publications and book chapters in pain management, especially on complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), intrathecal pumps, and spinal cord stimulators. He directs a comprehensive interdisciplinary rehabilitation program for treatment of CRPS, integrating physical therapy, behavioral treatment, neuromodulation, ketamine infusions, and occasionally hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
In his spare time Dr. Prager has served as a volunteer at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic (Internal Medicine) and with Interplast, providing anesthesia for children in the developing world who need surgical intervention for congenital anomalies.
Dr. Prager is the current director of California Pain Medicine Center and Center for Rehabilitation of Pain Syndromes at UCLA and is also the Editor of the California Society of Anesthesiologists Pain and End-of-Life CME Program.[4]
Dr. Prager serves on the Medical Evidence Evaluation Advisory Committee (MEEAC), a group appointed by the Governor of California to develop treatment guidelines for medical care of the injured worker. He is a Medical Expert for the Medical Board of California, the California Attorney General and the District Attorney of the County of Los Angeles. He has advised Medicare on the local level as reimbursement expert and as a member of the Clinical Advisory Committee (CAC) and currently holds an appointment on the national level on the Clinical Advisory Committee.
Dr. Prager has been interviewed extensively in lay media for expertise in pain medicine. This includes extended interviews in the National Public Radio[5] as well as ABC News,[6] Nightline, Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, Lifestyle Magazine,[7] the Wall Street Journal, USA today, Dateline NBC, and the National Geographic Television.
Dr. Prager has also been cited in medical media including Medscape[8] CE Medicus,[9] and PainClinician.com
For many years Dr Prager ended every lecture with his credo, "No one should ever wish for death because of the unwillingness of a health care provider or third party payer to provide the most appropriate medication delivered by the optimal route to provide pain relief without untoward side-effects"