The faculty welcome
At the faculty welcome for the 44th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Shoulder Society, held together with the 1st Asia-Pacific Shoulder Elbow Symposium in October 2017.
The Japanese Shoulder Society
The Japanese Shoulder Society is Japan's national subspecialty society for shoulder surgery. Societies of this kind hold an annual scientific meeting at which members present research, review current practice, and debate the areas where opinion is divided. Japan has a long established research tradition in shoulder surgery, and the society's annual meeting is followed by shoulder surgeons well beyond Japan.
Why a regional symposium matters
The Asia-Pacific Shoulder Elbow Symposium was held alongside the Japanese meeting. Regional meetings serve a purpose that neither national nor global ones do. Surgeons across the Asia-Pacific region deal with broadly similar patient populations, similar patterns of injury and similar constraints on their health systems, and they can realistically collaborate on research and visit each other's units. Bringing them together in one place makes those working relationships easier to form than a larger meeting on another continent does.
Faculty and the social programme
Faculty at a meeting of this kind give invited lectures, chair sessions, and take part in panel discussions and case debates. The faculty welcome is a working part of the programme rather than an aside. A good deal of the useful exchange at a surgical meeting happens outside the lecture theatre, where a surgeon can describe a difficult case to someone who has seen the same problem and ask directly how they handled it.
Related information
See our other Tokyo posts, including the JSS 2017 scientific meeting and the presidential dinner. Our shoulder surgery page describes the procedures discussed at meetings of this kind.