Editor’s note: The third North American Pain School (NAPS) took place June 24-28, 2018, in Montebello, Quebec, Canada. An educational initiative of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trial Translations, Innovations, Opportunities, and Networks (ACTTION), and presented by the Quebec Pain Research Network (QPRN), NAPS brings together leading experts in pain research and management to provide 30 trainees with scientific education, professional development, and networking experiences. This year’s theme was “To Boldly Go… : The Future of Pain Treatment.” Six of the trainees were also selected to serve as PRF-NAPS Correspondents, who provided firsthand reporting from the event, including interviews with NAPS’ six visiting faculty members and summaries of scientific sessions, along with coverage on social media. This is the sixth installment of interviews from the Correspondents, whose work is featured on PRF and RELIEF, PRF’s companion site for the public. (See previous interviews with Ian Gilron here, Allan Basbaum here, Stefan Friedrichsdorf here, Michael Salter here, and Judy Watt-Watson here).
Professor Irene Tracey, MA, D.Phil., holds the Nuffield Chair of Anaesthetic Science and is head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford, UK. In 1997, she helped to co-found the now world-leading Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB) at the University of Oxford and was its director from 2005 until 2015. Over the past 18 years her multidisciplinary research team has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception, pain relief, and nociceptive processing within the injured and non-injured human central nervous system using advanced neuroimaging techniques. More recently, they have been investigating the neural bases of altered states of consciousness during anaesthesia. At the 2018 North American Pain School, Tracey sat down for a podcast interview with PRF-NAPS Correspondent Natalie Osborne, a PhD student at Krembil Research Institute, University of Toronto, Canada, to talk about pain brain (and spinal cord) imaging, why she thinks it’s time to rebrand or rename the term “placebo analgesia,” and her advice for young scientists. Listen to the podcast below.
Podcast music credit: Hannibal Vector, “Wild Night”
