Eastern Pain Association Annual Meeting 2019 Abstract Session Award Winners

Introduction The 2019 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Pain Association provided a clear foundation for the future of pain medicine as it heralded the year 2020. The best way to optimally manage chronic pain patients of the future is for pain professionals to go back to our past as a multidisciplinary discipline. The multimechanistic, multimodal and multidisciplinary approach lies at the heart of Eastern Pain Association's mission as a multidisciplinary society that is dedicated to disseminating scientific knowledge as it relates to pain medicine through improved pathophysiological understanding, discovery of new therapeutic targets and interventions to improve patient outcomes. Moderation and a combination approach are key. We are not allowing the field of pain to be reduced to pro vs anti-opioid or pro vs anti-interventional pain wars. The focus is to gain a deeper understanding of our patients' pain through improved knowledge, and the abstracts presented at the Eastern Pain Association's 2019 Annual Meeting are a small step in that direction. The three award-winning abstracts that are presented here give us a glimpse into what the future holds, from improved understanding of chronic pain mechanisms to further progress in the field of regenerative medicine. Enjoy.