An Expanding Reach
Many other factors—including an exponential growth in effective treatments and industry involvement—have contributed to the current increased participation in the Annual Scientific Meeting. Attendance numbers have always been a source of friendly competition among ACR presidents, notes Dr. Kaplan. “It was sort of unspoken, but we each wanted to see who could get the biggest participation at ‘our’ meeting. I thought I was such a hotshot,” he recalls cheerfully, “when there were over 5,000 attendees who came to the Minneapolis meeting in 1994!” (The 2008 Annual Scientific Meeting had over 14,800 attendees.)
International outreach has also been a hallmark of the ACR in the last 20 years, and both Dr. Shulman and Dr. Kaplan have played a role in this trend. Dr. Shulman served as president of the Pan American League Against Rheumatism (PANLAR) from 1982–1986. At the 1994 Annual Scientific Meeting, Dr. Kaplan organized a gathering of European rheumatology professors invited to encourage their greater participation with the ACR. Everyone, he recalls, fit in one room! Now, as indicated by non-U.S. meeting participants and journal article submissions, that outreach has paid off.
And yet, despite all these positive indicators, Dr. Kaplan still worries about the same theme he advanced in his 1994 Presidential Address entitled “My Granddaughter, The Rheumatologist”: the dearth of practicing rheumatologists. The ACR’s proactive efforts, such as the recently published Workforce Study, are aimed at solutions to this challenge.
The challenges throughout the years have not diminished the passion that rheumatologists have for their specialty—a message that comes through loud and clear in conversation with these two leaders of the field. Paraphrasing an article written by Dr. Arnett, a former fellow at JHMI, Dr. Shulman asserts, “Rheumatology is the most intellectually exciting specialty in medicine!”
Gretchen Henkel is a freelance journalist based in California.
