2-3 March, Royal College of Physicians, London, UK
Dear Friends
I hope you had a restful Christmas and have returned invigorated to face the new year. If like me the stack of emails seems too much to bear, rest assured that it is only 2 months to go until the highlight of the year – the BNPA conference “Our perception of the world and it’s effect on health”.
Much of my day job involves seeing patients where a patients family may be concerned about them and the set of symptoms other clinicians have elicited don’t fit into a neat diagnostic box. Is this a Parkinson’s tremor or a cerebellar tremor, is this autism or dementia, is this psychosis or organic hallucinations. To assess patients we all rely on our own preconceived understanding and perception of the world and our ability to relate that to what others experience and feel. However what if those perceptions are different?
In the conference this year we have speakers investigating the effect on disease of different cultures, different neurodiversity and different environments that they find themselves in. We have a giant in the cognitive field John Hodges who will talk about the interaction between autism and the diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia. How do our perceptions of normal affect how we make a diagnosis? Mark Edwards and Devin Terhune will talk about how placebo and suggestion have a role in functional neurological disease with Matt Burke from Toronto looking at the role of placebo in contemporary medicine. We will also be looking at the effect of extreme environments on people’s mental health; whether that is space with Charles Dukes, Humanitarian catastrophes with Peter Hughes or intensive care with Dorothy Wade. However, there are many other excellent speakers over the two days.
Please take a look at the programme and book your registration for what is going to be an insightful, thought provoking and clinically revealing conference.
