Paolo Martelletti

• President 1st Joint Congress ANIRCEF – SISC

After years of an unsatisfactory coexistence, with the motivations of being separated lost in time, we will be experimenting a fairly long period of cultural cooperation and organizational synergies with the Italian Neurological Association for Headache Research (ANIRCEF). ANIRCEF and the Italian Society for the Study of Headaches (SISC), have united forces on a common project of organizing joint annual congresses. This moment, viewed as a triumph of righteousness and ergonomics, will give us all an opportunity, in a climate of a serene, constructive meeting, to express again a powerful, unified voice at a national level and real political weight at an international level.

Both are needed: the unified voice to ensure that the Diagnostic Therapeutic Care Pathways (Percorsi Diagnostico Terapeutico Assistenziali - PDTA) are extended to all the Regions, avoiding jeopardising management procedures. A new class of biological drugs for the prophylactic treatment of non chronic migraine is fast working its way towards our Headache Centers, and will need to find a health care network accredited by leading scientific societies in the field but, at the same time, recognized by the Regions in order to dispense these drugs in the outpatient setting with the direct reimbursement scheme (File F). This has already happened for the biological drugs used in rheumatology, dermatology, gastroenterology, and oncology. The existing or new Diagnostic Therapeutic Care Pathways in many Regions will support this network. With unity and efficiency we will be able to provide an appropriate, targeted and controlled response to the new health demands that will come from our patients.

The second possibility, political weight at an international level, will offer opportunities only if together we assert our ideas within the international scientific societies where, in spite of the objective quality of scientific research, extensive health care ramification and the excellent education, we have for too many years begged for crumbs.

The 1st Joint Congress ANIRCEF-SISC will be held in Rome from 29 to 31 October 2015 and will be a unique opportunity. Without barriers and other obstacles we will be able to weave integrated and transversal research projects. The period of reduced investments in the area of clinical medicine is ending and only cohesion will make us fully grasp the enormous possibilities for future research.
We should not miss this great opportunity.

Best wishes to all of you for the new year, many thanks to all the people who have worked, and who have expressed their views, all of them prominent and listened to, without exception, in favour of this synergic project. Special recognition goes to the Organizing Committee of the 1st Joint Congress ANIRCEF - SISC and a particular thanks goes to Pietro Cortelli, who together with me, became coryphaeus of all these feelings.

He will be handed the baton of this honorable relay race with the final hope that we may complete the ring.

January 1st, 2015

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