Publications
APS Bulletin • Volume 13, Number 1, 2003
President’s Message
Our Strength Is Our Diversity
Christine Miaskowski, PhD RN
One of our greatest strengths as a Society has the potential to be our greatest liability.
I write these words with some fear and trepidation. I would like to share with you one of the recurrent themes throughout my presidency. I am sharing this information with the membership because I believe it is a theme with which we need to grapple and resolve.
The strength I am referring to is the diversity of our membership. Our strength and our uniqueness among pain organizations come from the fact that we are a Society whose membership comprises multiple disciplines. By virtue of this diversity, APS represents the pain community as a whole. No other professional pain organization can make that claim.
So why do I raise the issue of liability? As I travel around the country and receive communications from APS members, more often than not, those communications are centered on a particular theme: “I’m concerned APS is spending too much time and effort on,” or “I’m concerned APS has become too involved with.” Here are two examples. I recently received a letter from a physician member who told me he was withdrawing his membership because we are promoting behavioral techniques and putting down interventional techniques. Less than 2 weeks later, I was speaking with a psychologist who thought APS was becoming too involved with the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, and not giving enough attention to cognitive-behavioral interventions for the management of chronic pain. These two examples illustrate my point about strength versus liability.
I’d like to reiterate that these examples are not isolated events, but recurrent themes as I travel. The perspective often presented on a given issue is from a particular discipline or represents a particular point of view.
My purpose in making this issue the focus of my President’s Message is twofold. I am asking each of you to take the time to think about the notion that one of our greatest strengths as a Society has the potential to be our greatest liability. I think we need to give a great deal of careful consideration to our particular points of view and other people’s points of view.
In addition, I would like each of you to consider some of the new thinking about how advances in science will come about in the 21st century. I recently attended a meeting at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A topic of conversation was the study being conducted by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on the structure and function of the NIH. One of the major foci of the IOM study will be to determine if the current organizational structure of the NIH will facilitate future developments and breakthroughs in science. The current structure of the NIH may best be characterized as a series of silos organized around specific diseases. Part of the discussion at this meeting addressed the issue that science has become too big for one discipline or area to possess all of the knowledge and skills to create breakthroughs. It is predicted that the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the 21st century will come when groups of individuals from different disciplines, with different areas of expertise, and perhaps most importantly, with different perspectives, work together to achieve a common goal or answer an intriguing question.
I believe the diverse APS membership is our greatest strength! Our diversity of disciplines will serve us well as we grapple with research questions and clinical challenges for the common goal of improving pain management. I am asking each of you to take the time to consider the different perspectives each discipline brings to the Society. Rather than leave the organization or grumble about a point of view that is different from your own, I ask each of you to challenge each other so we can grow and make significant breakthroughs that will improve pain management.