The World Congress on Pain has officially wrapped for 2026, and it was fantastic. The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) put on a great conference, with over 5,000 pain researchers from 130 countries. Most of those folks have arrived back home by now, except those, like myself, lucky enough to stay a little longer in the Land of Smiles for some post-meeting downtime.
I’m reaching you from a tiny island in the Gulf of Thailand, where the waves lap a small strip of beach and thunderheads roll overhead, bursts of lightning flashing now and then. While I’m still here, I’d like to capture a few highlights for you:
Monday
This “pre-conference” day featured symposia organized by the various special interest groups (SIGs) of IASP. I picked the Neuropathic Pain SIG, which presented talks on the molecular mechanisms of neuropathic pain and the new treatments they might lead to. It featured Pat Dougherty, a scientist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center who I’d like to feature in a future podcast. The day wrapped with the welcome reception featuring traditional regional Thai dances performed by attendees from around the country.
Tuesday
One of the most impressive sessions I attended was on digital storytelling. You might have seen my video post about it. It featured researchers from South Africa, the UK, New Zealand and Australia who received the IASP’s Collaborative Research Grant to examine how patients’ stories can support healing and improve pain care. The session kicked off with a pre-recorded video message from Joletta Belton, a Colorado woman living with chronic pain who has long been a champion of including people with lived experience and their stories in research.
Wednesday
I’m a pain researcher, too, and this was the day for me to wear my researcher hat. I’m a part of the Acute to Chronic Pain Signatures (A2CPS) Consortium, and our A2CPS contingent made a real showing at the World Congress. We presented nine posters and a symposium called Biosignatures from Multimodal Datasets, which featured A2CPS Investigator Giovanni Berardi alongside researchers from Japan and Germany. Our posters showcased our large, comprehensive dataset, which is available now to researchers outside the Consortium. You can learn more at a2cps.org.
Thursday
I loved all of the plenary talks, but I particularly enjoyed the talk from Saurab Sharma, a physiotherapist and researcher in Australia who’s originally from Nepal. While some people may think of chronic pain as a “first-world problem,” it is very much not that. The burden of chronic pain is even higher in low- and middle-income countries, affecting about one in two people compared to one in four in the U.S. Dr. Sharma’s talk shook the audience to attention, in case anyone had ceased to consider the global scale of the problem of chronic pain. I was fortunate to interview Saurab for a future podcast episode while we were on the same continent. Another highlight that day was conducting quick, on-the-spot interviews on camera (for the Pain Research Forum) with the winners of the Data Blitz, in which young researchers present their work in three-minute talks.
Friday
Another stellar plenary talk closed out the meeting, this one from Annina Schmid of Oxford University. Dr. Schmid spoke about entrapment neuropathies, a group of conditions including carpal tunnel and sciatica that arise when a nerve becomes irritated as it travels through a too-small space. I learned a ton, and I think you will too when you hear the podcast episode I recorded with Annina. Friday we also heard the official announcement that the next World Congress will be held in Geneva, Switzerland. I think I see my future self doing some Alpine hiking…
That’s a wrap
Yes, Bangkok is a long way to come for a scientific meeting, but after the slog of a 24-hour journey, everything ran pretty smoothly. Train travel was remarkably easy (and air conditioned!) to the BITEC convention center, which featured a giant food hall on the lower level. I very much appreciated the easy access to food at any time, because low blood sugar is not my friend, and decent food is often hard to come by in convention centers. All that said, any time you venture outside, there’s a high likelihood you’ll soon be drenched, either in sweat, by a passing deluge, or both. Inside the meeting, the hardest part was choosing which concurrent session to attend.
Honestly this is only the briefest sampling of what I saw last week. Looking back at my schedule and my camera roll, I have to wonder, how did I do and see and learn so much in five days? I’m now thanking my summer self who booked this post-meeting downtime here in Thailand. Stay tuned for more, including podcasts with plenary speakers Clifford Woolf, Yves De Koninck and Neil O’Connell.