NCCIH Research Blog

The NIH Pain Consortium works to enhance pain research and promote collaboration on it across NIH Institutes and Centers. As a member of the Consortium’s executive committee, I am pleased to tell you that videos of presentations from our 2018 symposium, “From Science to Society: At the Intersection of Chronic Pain Management and the Opioid Crisis,” are available online.

The many compelling talks I heard at this year’s symposium included a “fireside chat” between NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams; remarks by the new president of the American Pain Society, Dr. William Maixner; and talks by clinicians and pain patients.

Among the Surgeon General’s points that I found particularly interesting were his comments on this “moment of opportunity,” e.g., to change how we approach discussing chronic pain with patients and to examine factors such as trauma, environment, and stigma in a person’s pain. He also discussed the need for implementation science to optimize the evidence-based treatments in health care systems.

At the end of the first day, I presented the annual Mitchell Max Award for Research Excellence to Dr. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, University of Pennsylvania, for his poster presentation on developing a mouse pain scale using sub-second behavioral mapping and statistical modeling. An important theme across biomedical research is that we should nurture and support our early career investigators. This would show our commitment toward supporting the future of pain research and solve the Nation’s public-health problem of pain.

In closing, I invite you to attend a one-day pain symposium co-sponsored by the NIH Pain Consortium, NCCIH, and NIH’s Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research on Tuesday, September 11, 2018, in advance of the World Congress on Pain sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Pain. As Dr. Wen Chen described in her recent blog post, the symposium—Chronic Pain: The Science of Complementary and Integrative Health Approaches—will include presentations by internationally renowned scientists. I highly recommend registering early and hope you will join us.

View the agenda for Chronic Pain: The Science of Complementary and Integrative Health Approaches.

View Part 1 of this post here.