As the EULAR conference wound down on Saturday, the clouds finally moved out to take up residence some place else in the Baltic. The sun shined brilliantly and the sky turned radiant blue. The conference ended with two summary lectures (kudos to the lecturers for reviewing thousands of abstracts to create such an interesting potpourri).
After a glass of wine with the last stalwarts in the lobby of the Bella Center, I went with friends to the Tivoli Gardens, a glorious amusement park that had its share of misery during World War II. While I sipped a Carlsberg in the warmth of the afternoon sun, members of the Tivoli Guard paraded by in snappy red and white uniforms, playing their fifes and drums as the Demon roller coaster roared through the park.
A meeting with the climatic vicissitudes of the 2009 EULAR congress can’t help but inspire metaphors to describe the state of our specialty. As I took the last sips of my beer, I asked myself, “What is the real rheumatology today?” Is it the Little Mermaid, solitary in a roiling sea pelted by cold rain from dense black clouds? Or, is it a Tivoli guard, a beaming youth giddy with pride as he marches triumphantly with a bearskin helmet?
The wildly contrasting scenes in Copenhagen presented too stark a choice for a metaphor for today’s rheumatology. It is time to go to the ACR meeting in Philadelphia to widen the selection. Who knows? Maybe rheumatology is really Rocky.
Dr. Pisetsky is physician editor of The Rheumatologist and professor of medicine and immunology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.