Research in Motion

This blog talks about my experience of attending the 2021 Back and Neck Pain forum.

So, this was my first international conference, and I got a chance to attend it after the organizers offered bursaries for researchers from Lower Middle-income countries (LMICs). I immediately applied for the bursary and submitted a paper for oral presentation too. Luckily, I got to attend the conference for free, and my paper also got selected for presentation. I am thankful to Dr. Saurabh Sharma for the initiative of bursaries for the LMICs participants.

As a researcher from LMICs, there are a lot of take-home messages for me. More than that, I understood the barriers, researchers face in the LMICs. And not just that, it made me reflect on the research conducted in my native country. Before highlighting that, I would accentuate a few things about the conference.

The conference was conducted in three different time zones: Eastern standard time, Central European Time, and Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT). In short, three conferences within a single conference. That’s a colossal task pulled off by the organizers.

As I reside in India, I was only able to attend the EST and AEDT zones presentations. However, I had to be up early, at around 3 AM in India, to attend the AEDT zone presentation. But I would say it was worth it. The virtual platform was a unique way of attending the conference; the ‘avatar’ just made it look more real. The recordings would help me in attending the missed sessions too.

The poster section was exciting in the way it was arranged and presented, and yes, the content was absolutely informative. The availability of the booklets of abstracts is helping me in reading about all the papers submitted.

All in all, the conference has been thought-provoking for me. I enjoyed the sessions, and I got exposed to such a vast amount of research going on in different parts of the globe. Hearing and reading the abstracts ignited new ideas for conducting research.  I got to hear from the leading researchers in the field of back and neck pain: Prof Chris Maher, Prof Jonathan Hill, Dr. Mary O Keffe, Prof Steven George, Prof Babita Ghai, Prof. Peter O Sullivan, Joletta Belton, Prof Sallie Lamb, and many more.

The main thing I learned from the forum is that research takes time, patience, perseverance. It’s a team effort, and you need a great leader to move the team ahead. More than that, I understood that funding is a major driving force for the research. The effort that goes into it is immense, and I think that must be appreciated while critically examining a piece of research. Also, I experienced that the intent of doing research must be to drive change in how we treat our patients. And not merely targeting the numbers! Researchers need funds to conduct and execute studies.

I correspondingly learned about research and health equity, patient involvement in research, the role of telerehabilitation in back pain management, the role of exercise their worthwhile effect, prognosis & causation, and much more.

At last, I would like to highlight the barriers that popped in my mind during the conference that we as LMICs researchers face; the most significant obstacle is funding. Other than that, research is not the primary consideration in many of the academic institutes and organizations, which makes it difficult to devote time to the research you are conducting. There can be many more, but I guess there will always be barriers and more importantly, we need to find ways to overcome these.

I, as a researcher, try my best to contribute to the research community to the best of my efforts. I would not say I am the only one or have done enough on my part, but I’m trying to the maximum.

I wanted to keep it concise, but it seems now that I failed the aim. Nevertheless, I hope to get more such opportunities in the future. I enjoyed being part of the conference. I’m thankful to the organizers!

Thanks for reading the blog.

Ammar Suhail PT