Welcome

On behalf of the organising committee I would like to invite you to the New Zealand Pain Society's Annual Scientific Meeting. The Society's last meeting was two long years ago with the 2011 meeting falling victim to events in Christchurch. In setting the programme for the Wellington meeting we have endeavoured to keep some of the content and spirit of this cancelled meeting alive, and indeed will have a morning dedicated to the trauma and pain in Christchurch. We have also expanded the programme to extend a full day longer than usual for those who are worried they missed out in 2011 - so we hope there will be something to hold the interest for everyone attending.

The theme of our meeting is “A Head of Pain”, a not very subtle pun! Most of those working in pain management probably feel it is a hard enough job trying to keep up with the rapidly expanding knowledge base in the field, let alone getting "ahead of pain", but we believe that we have managed to attract a stellar panel of international and local speakers, presenting on the cutting edge, with topics such as how to make placebo work for you, achieving acceptance of pain, and the latest in functional MRI. As the title theme implies the focus will be on central aspects of pain particularly around the brain, and we will even have a session on headache pain! There will be sessions on a huge range of topics, as the longer meeting format allows leeway to cover the field of pain management more broadly. We will have refresher lectures from experts in their field, plenary sessions, workshops galore (including a novel and exciting interactive workshop on how to create your own fMRI research paradigm) plus free papers and posters. We hope we have covered as many aspects of pain as possible, acute and chronic, clinical and research. Even if we haven't managed to whet your intellectual taste buds, we would encourage you to come along, to let your hair down with the social programme, catch up with old friends, make new ones, and enjoy a few days in a great city amongst like minded souls, to get your head around "a head of pain".

Dr John Speirs
Conference Convenor – NZPS ASM 2012