An anesthesiologist and chief of pain management at South Nassau for more than a quarter-century, Dr. Kirschen runs several interventional pain management clinics on Long Island using traditional and alternative medicine techniques.

1. For Immediate Release December 23, 2014
Contact: Damian Becker, Manager of Media Relations
(516) 377-5370
Physician is More than a Specialist in Pain Management
Oceanside, NY— The Long Island Business News (LIBN) recently awarded its “Health Care Heroes”
Physician Hero Award to Neil Kirschen, M.D., chief of pain management at South Nassau Communities
Hospital. LIBN’s “Health Care Heroes” awards honor individuals and organizations in the health care industry
in Nassau and Suffolk counties for outstanding leadership and commitment.
An anesthesiologist and chief of pain management at South Nassau for more than a quarter-century, Dr.
Kirschen runs several interventional pain management clinics on Long Island using traditional and alternative
medicine techniques. When he’s not at his full-time job, he’s volunteering as a firefighter and emergency
medical technician for the Rockville Centre Fire Department and as the medical director of the Rockville
Centre, Roosevelt and Hicksville fire departments. During his 30 years of service, he has responded to
thousands of fire and EMS calls and seen more than his share of cardiac arrests, house and building fires and
motor vehicle accidents.
If he’s not busy fighting fires, tending to the sick and injured or providing continuing medical education
and mentoring to EMTs, he’s instructing village police departments throughout Nassau County how to
administer lifesaving intranasal Narcan® for drug overdoses. “When you call 911, that’s when you’re most in
need,” says Dr. Kirschen.
Driven by a passion for “pre-hospital emergency care,” Dr. Kirschen is also a member of the Nassau
Regional Emergency Medical Advisory Committee, which develops policies and protocols for EMTs in Nassau
County. As a medical control physician for the EMS System, he directs medical care at the “pre-hospital scene”
for patients who require advanced life support.
In his hometown of Rockville Centre, he teaches members of the village’s police and auxiliary first-aid
techniques to administer to themselves, should they become wounded on the job. “Each officer is given a first-
aid kit and they learn how to patch their own wounds before the ambulance arrives,” he said. “This is done to
save the lives of the police and auxiliary.”
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2. Several times a year he travels to upstate Rome, where he advises emergency preparedness officials on
course curriculum offered at the New York State Preparedness Training Center, which serves as a hub for
emergency response training for natural, technological and terrorism-related disasters for first responders.
A lot of his volunteer work is done on nights and weekend, and for the most part, it’s local, except for
his medical missions work. That work takes him to Guadalajara, Mexico— more than 2,000 miles away. Each
fall for the past seven years, he and three dozen physicians from all over the U.S., who are members of the
American Association of Orthopedic Medicine (AAOM), staff the city hospital’s pain clinic. During the week-
long visit, villagers who make the hours-long trek from the mountains and hillsides line up for relief of all types
of musculoskeletal pain and sprains, from farm accidents or other work-related injuries to motor vehicle
crashes.
“Some of these people have never seen a doctor,” said Dr. Kirschen, a past president of AAOM who
also makes house calls for bedridden residents of the city.
When he’s not at the clinic relieving pain, he’s training doctors and medical residents from Guadalajara
and other far-flung locales such as China, Romania and Greece, to administer treatments such as prolotherapy,
platelet rich plasma and stem cell injections that stimulate the body’s natural ability to repair tissue. Through
instruction and hands-on workshops, he helps these physicians begin the two-year process toward certification
in pain management.
“We are the barefoot doctors down there,” he said. “We don’t have high-tech stuff. We have local
anesthetic and sugar water [dextrose solution used in pain treatments], yet we can turn the disease process
around using these simple techniques.”
Designated a Magnet® hospital by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), South Nassau®
Communities Hospital is one of the region’s largest hospitals, with 455 beds, more than 900 physicians and
3,000 employees. Located in Oceanside, NY, the hospital is an acute-care, not-for-profit teaching hospital that
provides state-of-the-art care in cardiac, oncologic, orthopedic, bariatric, pain management, maternity, mental
health and emergency services. In addition to its extensive outpatient specialty centers, South Nassau provides
emergency and elective angioplasty, and is the only hospital on Long Island with the Novalis Tx™ and Gamma
Knife® radiosurgery technologies. South Nassau is a designated Stroke Center by the New York State
Department of Health and Comprehensive Community Cancer Center by the American College of Surgeons and
is an accredited center of the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Association and Quality Improvement Program.
In addition, the hospital has been awarded the Joint Commission’s gold seal of approval as a Top Performer on
Key Quality Measures, including heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care; and disease-specific
care for hip and joint replacement, wound care and end-stage renal disease. For more information, visit
www.southnassau.org.
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