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Denise D. Lester, MD (she/her/hers)

Anesthesiologist Pain Physician Addiction Medicine Physician
Central Virginia Veterans Health Service Center, VCU Health Assoc Professor PMR
Midlothian, Virginia, United States

Dr. Denise Lester is an Associate Professor in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at Vrignia Commmonwealth University (VCU) and is board certified in Anesthesiology, Pain Management and Addiction Medicine. She received her medical degree at New Jersey School of Medicine and completed her Anesthesiology Residency, Pain Management and Addiction Medicine training at Thomas Jefferson University Medical Center in Philadelphia. She is the Director of the Peripheral Nerve Stimulation Implant Program and the Co-Director of Interventional Pain Research at the Richmond VA Medical Center.. She has been a pain management educatoras an attending teaching physician for tthe VCU Pain Fellowship several decades. during which she received multiple “faculty teaching excellence of the year” awards. She has been a leader in pain research in the peripheral nerve stimulator program and has instituted peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) programs for four of the five FDA-approved peripheral nerve stimulating implant devices and has provided a variety of spinal cord stimulation and peripheral nerve implantable neuromodulation for nearly 30 years of her VHA interventional pain practice.

She is the Vice Chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB), an Alternate Chair of the Research & Development committee (R&D) and a board member of the McGuire Research Institute . She is the primary investigator on seven PNS research trials including an acute pain four year study evaluating the outcomes of PNS within one week of lower extremity amputation for post amputation pain, - a chronic pain retrospective review of a 5 year experience with PNS in chronic neuropathic pain syndromes , a national multicenter trial evaluating PNS for the management of chronic lumbar pain and a national VHA multicenter trial evaluating various complementary alternative therapies for back pain . She is also currently an investigator on the use of spinal cord neuromodulation for assisting locomotion in paralyzed veterans.

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