The Napa Pain Conference

A Community Like No Other

Eric J. Grigsby, MD, MBA
Founder of the Napa Pain Conference

If we’re lucky, the days go slowly enough for us to enjoy, but the years certainly go quickly. In 1989, as a young man and a recently-minted Anesthesiologist and Pain Physician, I was asked to start a Pain Management Program at the University of California at Davis. Living in Napa, I commuted the hour to Sacramento. You could do that in those days, with mostly farmland between here and there. There were very few established practice models at that time, but my task was to figure out how to build a University Pain Management Department.

I knew early on that we needed a conference where everyday practitioners could get together, build a community, and share stories, successes, and challenges in treating our patients. In 1989, there were no regular Pain Meetings in California, and none in the fall throughout the entire United States! (how of course there are several nearly every weekend.) So, my staff at UC Davis and I decided to host the First Annual Napa Pain Conference in 1990.  (If you do the math, you will see that we did miss a couple of early years between then and now.)

But we accomplished what we set out to do. The Napa Pain Conference has built communities of like-minded practitioners and facilitated the cycle of innovation by building relationships between all of the stakeholders in our filed. From the beginning, the Napa Pain Conference has enjoyed presentations by the luminaries of science and medicine. Virtually every pain related advance since 1989 has been presented early in its life at this conference. I am grateful that my friends and colleagues come to Napa every year to share their amazing science, clinical practice, and life-earned perspectives.

In recent years, there have been presentations from the former Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, a national medal of science recipient, the winner of the 2018 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, and a recipient of the Nobel Prize itself. 

Many of you tell us this is your best meeting of the year. For returning friends, Welcome back! For first-time attendees, welcome to Napa Valley and the Napa Pain Meeting!

Guiding Principles

The success of the Napa Pain Conference is rooted in creating and serving a community devoted to:

At Neurovations, we fundamentally believe in diversity and inclusion in our workforce, in our decision-making, and in how we care for patients. We celebrate all of our employees and believe this is critical for innovation and to achieve the best care for every patient. Our unwavering mission is to inspire hope and to contribute to the health and well-being of our patients and communities through integrated clinical practice, research, and education.

We need diversity. We need different cultures. We need men and women, young and old, to work together to solve the big questions.
Mary-Britt Moser, Recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine