The Gift of Illness: Closing Keynote at the Midlands Rheumatology Society

Dr Minha delivered the closing keynote at the Midlands Rheumatology Society’s Autumn Meeting, held at Pride Park Stadium in Derby on 11 October 2024. Founded in 1972, the Midlands Rheumatology Society brings together doctors, nurses, therapists, scientists and researchers from across the Midlands to advance education, collaboration and patient care in rheumatology, the specialty concerned with arthritis, autoimmune disease and the wider world of chronic musculoskeletal pain.

The setting was memorable, the hospitality suites of Derby County’s stadium, with the pitch being prepared for the next match below, and the programme, delivered to a room of around 200 rheumatologists, was a full one: rheumatology and respiratory medicine, axial spondyloarthritis clinics, biologic therapies, bone health, and a striking talk from the blind adventurer Miles Hilton-Barber on finding fulfilment when facing unwanted change. The meeting was chaired under the presidency of Dr Arumugam Moorthy, consultant rheumatologist at University Hospitals of Leicester.

Dr Minha’s closing keynote, “The Gift of Illness: Innovative Strategies for Pain and Chronic Disease,” was billed under her specialism of integrated and lifestyle medicine for pain, disability and work health. The title is deliberate: her own passage through serious illness reshaped the way she practises, and she wove that lived experience through the evidence for integrative approaches to pain and chronic disease (one slide read, simply, “A Personal and Professional Journey”). The response told its own story, consultants queuing afterwards to ask how they might refer patients to her, and whether she was part of the NHS. It was a telling glimpse of how much appetite there is, even among specialists, for the kind of care their own systems can struggle to provide.

That appetite is precisely the space Curaidh Clinic was built to occupy: working alongside NHS colleagues, not in competition with them, to offer patients with complex pain and chronic disease a genuinely integrative path.