One talk caught my eye in the COPA brochure this year.  Compared to the glamour and hard sell of some of the technologies on exhibit, this sounded like an old-fashioned modest but serious research project.  It was presented by a nurse from a Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre in Bedford.  “Interventions for neuropathic pain.”  Now neuropathic pain is not something I see all the time, but people do present with it, sometimes as a secondary problem. They have often lived with it and don’t generally expect me to be able to help much.  While I have sometimes had good results it has always been something of a mystery to me.  So this was potentially a very useful talk.

The Problem of Neuropathic Pain

I got a seat early: luckily, as it was standing room only by the time Miranda Olding began.  She described neuropathic pain as an “unpleasant lesion or disease…