A Reunion at the British Pain Society: Professor Amanda Williams
At the British Pain Society in Nottingham, Dr Minha reunited with Professor Amanda Williams of UCL, who co-authored her first pain research paper.
The British Pain Society’s 57th Annual Scientific Meeting, held in Nottingham from 4 to 6 June 2024, is the sort of gathering where the UK pain community comes together to debate the latest research and the harder questions of clinical practice. For Dr Minha, though, this one brought something more personal: a reunion twenty years in the making, with Professor Amanda C de C Williams of University College London and, to this day, the psychology section editor of the field’s flagship journal, PAIN.
Professor Williams is one of the most respected figures in the psychology of pain, and she was instrumental in Dr Minha’s early academic journey. Together they worked on Dr Minha’s first published pain paper, “Assessing Pain and Mood in a Poorly Resourced Country in a Post-Conflict Setting”, research conducted in Sierra Leone in 2004–2005 and published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in 2011, studying the pain carried by amputees in the aftermath of civil war. It was formative work, and Professor Williams was formative to it.
“These are the people who have shaped me,” Dr Minha reflects. “This is part of my ecosystem, people I have a lot of respect for, and sometimes they’re just forgotten. But I will never forget them.” The reunion was a chance to honour a mentor who, now retired and living with sight loss, had given her something she has never stopped drawing on.
That the psychology of pain should sit alongside its biology is not an afterthought at Curaidh Clinic. It is a founding principle. Pain is never only physical, and the mentors, collaborators and colleagues Dr Minha calls her ecosystem are the human foundation on which the clinic’s collaborative, whole-person model is built.
