Rainer Freynhagen MD

Professor Rainer Freynhagen is a specialist in anaesthesiology, intensive care, pain management, palliative care and sports medicine. He studied medicine in Germany, Switzerland and Great Britain and completed his studies 1992 at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf. After obtaining the status as Diplomate by the European Academy of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (DEAA) in 1999, he additionally completed a study in Health Management in Cologne in the following years.

For more than 10 years Professor Freynhagen led the Division of Pain Management and Palliative Medicine, Department of Anaesthesiology at the University Hospital Düsseldorf. In 2007 he was jointly awarded the Prize for Pain Research from the German Society for the Study of Pain (DGSS). Since April 2009 he is the elected head of the Department of Anaesthesiology, Critical Care Medicine, Pain Therapy & Palliative Care at the Benedictus Hospital Tutzing, Germany, an Academic Teaching Hospital of the Technical University Munich, which is at the same time one of the largest and renowned Pain Centres in Europe (Pain Centre Lake Starnberg). He holds his professorship, research and teaching assignment at the medical faculty of the Technical University of Munich.

Professor Freynhagen is an elected member of the European Society of Anaesthesiology, member of the International Association for the Study of Pain and many other national and international scientific associations. He is specialized in the diagnosis and treatment of neuropathic pain, back pain and the fibromyalgia syndrome. His main research interests focus on pharmacologic mechanisms, treatment, epidemiology and phenotyping of neuropathic pain. He and his co-workers developed painDETECT, a worldwide used screening tool to discriminate between neuropathic and non-neuropathic pain.

Rainer Freynhagen serves as scientific grant reviewer for the Ministry of Health in several countries and an authorized expert for the German Federal Government. He has published numerous research articles, book chapters and reviews in different prestigious international top journals in the field of pain medicine, Anaesthesiology and palliative care and he has delivered globally several hundred invited scientific lectures.