Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Virtual Global Pain Awareness Week Conference 2022
I have been a member of the Global Pain Faculty of the Consumer Healthcare business of GSK plc, formerly GlaxoSmithKline plc, for several years. In this role, I provide expert consultancy services on behalf of Leeds Beckett, enabling me to interact with a world leading multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company. In July 2022, GSK plc completed a demerger of the Consumer Healthcare business from the GSK Group to form the Haleon Group. In August I received my first invitation from Haleon; to deliver a keynote presentation at their Virtual Global Pain Awareness Conference 2022.
The conference included a series of webinar presentations by world renowned experts in pain management, and it was attended by participants from 52 countries. I was asked to speak to the title ‘Advances in pain management and research’, within a session called ‘The future of pain management: what can we expect?’
I decided to focus on the need to reconfigure the way we view persistent pain by considering perspectives from non-biomedical disciplines. I described how vast amounts of clinical research have failed to resolve long-standing uncertainty about the effectiveness of many pain treatments. I raised the question “Why is this so, and who benefits from such research?” and argued a need to evaluate the utility of treatments from the viewpoint of people living with pain.
I called for greater use of socio-ecological frameworks so that macro-level factors associated with modern living could be incorporated in explanatory models of pain. I concluded by saying that greater knowledge is needed from non-biomedical disciplines to unmask the reality of persistent pain and advance pain management strategies.
Professor Mark Johnson presenting at Global Pain Awareness Week
Professor Mark Johnson
Mark Johnson is Professor of Pain and Analgesia. He is an international expert on the science of pain and its management and the world leader on transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS). He has published over 300 peer reviewed articles.
