Anesthesiologist · Pain Physician · Professor of Anesthesia, McMaster University
Harsha
Shanthanna
An anesthesiologist and pain physician whose research asks how care can better serve older adults — before surgery, after it, and through the years of pain in between.
Between the operating room and the question that started it all.
Harsha Shanthanna is a Professor in the Department of Anesthesia at McMaster University, where his clinical work moves between the operating room and the chronic pain clinic he directs at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton. That dual vantage point — acute care and chronic care, the day of surgery and the years after — shapes almost everything he studies.
Pain, aging, and the questions that connect them.
His research programme spans perioperative medicine, chronic pain measurement, and neuromodulation — always returning to a single throughline: how do we protect function and quality of life for older adults living with pain?
Perioperative care for older adults
Opioid education and enhanced recovery pathways after knee replacement, and the cognitive outcomes that follow surgery later in life.
Measuring chronic pain
Quantitative tools for pain that go beyond self-report, built for aging bodies and long-term monitoring of mobility and low back pain.
Neuromodulation & nerve-directed care
Brain-computer interfaces for chronic neck pain, spinal cord stimulation guidelines, and regional anesthesia technique.
Findings that changed practice.
A selection of the studies and guidelines his work has contributed to — cited widely, and cited because they moved clinical decisions.
"The best research questions come from trainees who are still willing to ask why we do things the way we do."
Writing between the clinic and the literature.
On growing older with pain, not despite it
We spend a great deal of effort trying to eliminate pain, and comparatively little asking what a good life looks like alongside it...
What Bangalore taught me before medicine did
Long before I understood the pharmacology of an anesthetic, I understood what it meant to make someone comfortable...