Continuing Professional Development: A Royal Society of Medicine Meeting on Pain Management Ethics
At the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr Minha joined a meeting on the ethics of pain management, weighing effective relief against long-term harm.
In 2025, Dr Minha travelled to London for a clinical meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine, meeting a colleague on Harley Street on the way. Founded in its modern form in 1907 and with roots reaching back to 1805, the RSM is one of the largest medical membership organisations in the country, and, across its many specialty sections, one of the few places where clinicians gather not just to share the latest science but to debate the harder questions of how medicine should be practised.
This meeting turned on one of those questions: the ethics of pain management. It is among the most quietly difficult areas in modern medicine. Persistent pain is real and deserves treatment, yet the medicines that dull it, opioids in particular, carry their own well-documented harms when used long-term, from dependence to diminishing benefit. Clinicians are asked to hold both truths at once, weighing relief against risk, respecting a patient’s autonomy while being honest about what treatment can and cannot achieve. The movement toward safer, more transparent prescribing, captured in initiatives such as the Faculty of Pain Medicine’s Opioids Aware resource, has made these conversations central to good pain care. Since 2021, NICE guidance has gone further still, advising against starting opioids for chronic primary pain at all, precisely what keeps the ethical conversation live rather than academic. It is a conversation the RSM’s own Pain Medicine Section keeps on the table year-round.
For Dr Minha, the value of the discussion was concrete: it prompted a review of practice within the attendees’ own organisations, and counted as genuinely useful continuing professional development. It is a reminder that the best clinical learning is not always a new drug or technique, but the willingness to re-examine how decisions are made, and for whom.
That ethical, patient-first instinct sits at the very centre of Curaidh Clinic’s approach to chronic pain: treating pain seriously and compassionately, while weighing every option honestly against the evidence for the individual in front of you.
