It is an honor for us to host The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Pain Clinicians over the three days from Thursday, July 18 to Saturday, July 20, 2019 at Kumamoto Prefectural Theater and Kumamoto Gakuen University.

Kumamoto Prefecture was hit twice by an earthquake with a seismic intensity of 7 on April 14 and 16, 2016. Kumamoto City also experienced a foreshock with a seismic intensity of 6 lower and a main shock with a seismic intensity of 6 upper. As many of the damages caused by those earthquakes have been already restored, you currently do not see such damages too often in Kumamoto City. Meanwhile, there is still a long way to go before the complete reconstruction of Kumamoto Castle, the symbol of Kumamoto. The statues of a golden dolphin-like fish called “Shachihoko” have been eventually placed on its tower keep. It will still take much time to repair Kumamoto City. The repair of its stone walls has made very little progress so far, while we cannot forecast how far the reconstruction of Kumamoto Castle will have been progressed by the holding of this annual meeting. In the meantime, we have learned many lessons from these earthquakes. Further, another giant earthquake with a seismic intensity of 7 hit Hokkaido in September 2018, knocking out the electricity of its entire area. As such events have shown, we don’t know when, where and how a disaster will attack us. I have been truly realizing the importance of risk management enabling us to handle various situations in a flexible manner.

I believe that such way of thinking is also significant in the area of daily medical practices relating to pain treatments. While simulating various situations, we need to visualize a lot of possibilities in an open-minded attitude if a treatment approach has been found ineffective. I am convinced that we, as in disaster risk management, are required to be familiar with many treatment methods for dealing with different situations in designing a strategy for pain treatments. In this annual academic meeting, we will, with an aim to establish the pain clinic in the new era, propose pain treatments in combination with other medical treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy and rehabilitation in addition to nerve block/drug intervention.

I myself have been engaging in basic pain researches. I think that it is important for us to make an approach to pain and establish its treatment methods based on basic pain researches. Meanwhile, however, recent basic pain researches have produced few results that could be directly applied to pain treatments. As for the future direction of pain treatments, I believe that a ball should be thrown back and force between basic researches and clinical cares. Specifically, it is crucial for us to first build basic infrastructures for the pan treatment methods developed in clinical settings and then explore new treatment methods using the knowledge obtained through such process. I would like some speakers who will be attending this meeting to deliver a presentation from such perspective.