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UMB will host the third International Conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies (SIPS), “Harnessing Placebo Mechanisms for Optimal Pain Management and Treatment of Alcohol and Other Drug Use Disorders," virtually, May 26-28. The cost to attend is $15 for UMB affiliated faculty, staff, and students.
Expert faculty from UMB's Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy have collaborated with SIPS to design an interdisciplinary, international scientific conference to advance the science of placebo research and mind-body mechanisms and to apply this knowledge to alcohol use and pain disorders.
The conference will provide a collaborative platform to present and share innovative research findings and theoretical ideas on placebo research to an international audience of researchers; promote training and education of trainees, academic junior researchers, health care professionals, agencies, stakeholders, and the public; and advocate for the participation of minorities and women while expanding U.S. research in the global network of placebo research.
The program will include:
- Seven plenary sessions
- Three special sessions on COVID-19, placebo methodology, and virtual reality
- Over 20 workshops
- Peer-reviewed short oral presentations
- Peer-reviewed poster sessions
- Networking forums
Continuing education (CE) credit will be available for physicians, nurses, and pharmacists.
Presentations to include Plenary Lecture 3: Prediction, Expectation, and Pain Control by Howard Fields, MD, PhD, professor emeritus, Neurology and Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, with an introduction by Eric Weintraub, MD, associate professor and director, Division of Addiction Research and Treatment, Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Howard Fields received his MD and PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford in 1965-1966. Following clinical training in neurology at Harvard Medical School in 1972, he joined the faculty of the University of California San Francisco, where he is currently professor of neurology and physiology emeritus. His group discovered and elucidated a pain modulating neural circuit that engages endogenous opioids and is activated by opioid analgesics. Furthermore, they showed that placebo analgesia can be blocked by an opioid antagonist, opening the way to a neurobiological explanation of placebo analgesia. His later work centered on the problem of addiction. His team discovered nerve cells in the striatum that selectively encode the magnitude of a reward and how opioid control of the neurotransmitter dopamine contributes to motivation and reward-based choice. In 1997, he was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine and in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018-2019, he served as a member of the congressionally mandated pain management task force to develop guidelines for the treatment of chronic pain.