Things Have Changed

Things Have Changed

STEVEN ELIAS, MD, FACS, FAVLS, CHAIR, 2019 AVLS ANNUAL CONGRESS

There was an FM radio show in New York City – Idiots Delight hosted by Vin Scelsa. Different. A real radio show with intent, a theme, and a vision each week. The show always began with Vin reciting:

“What it comes down to is this: Respect the Elders. Embrace the new. Encourage the impractical and improbable, Without bias. This is Idiots Delight.”

A good way to live one’s life, and a good way to think of structuring a meeting.

This year’s American Vein & Lymphatic Society (AVLS) meeting has many of these same elements. The meeting respects the Elders. The time honored traditional elements of our meeting are still here but with a twist. No society should be stagnant as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “So we beat on. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We need to embrace the new: our new name announced at last year’s meeting and our new logo premiered at this year’s meeting. We have taken a new approach, minimizing concurrent sessions and maximizing the time we all spend together. After all, we are all in this together.

The theme of our meeting is: F:LIP or Focus: Live, Interactive, Practical. Each day at the end of the morning, we all get together for an hour or so for One Big Thing, a topic that we think everyone needs to hear about. Live, the second part of this morning session involves live ultrasound imaging of patients with you helping to decide how to best manage these patients. Interactive occurs at the end of each afternoon session. Again we all get together. Cases are

presented by faculty, care is discussed and decisions are made by an audience response system. You decide on what to do. Practical takes place when we break up into individual sessions. The faculty responsible for these have worked very hard to address the practical management of patients with venous and lymphatic disease. AVLS has many courses throughout the year that teach the basics and the Sunday courses of this meeting will as well, but this annual meeting takes us to another level.

The next level of academic content has been achieved by our Abstract Committee. They have picked excellent podium and poster presentations of new ideas, new data, and new topics. The importance to the presenters and ourselves cannot be emphasized enough. Be there. We ARE the American Vein & Lymphatic Society: Advocacy, Research, Education. These sessions highlight our mission.

We may find out that some changes turn out to be impractical or improbable, but we approached the changes without bias. We are glad you are here to enjoy the adventure of this AVLS meeting. While the theme is F:LIP, our goal is to achieve the most appropriate care of our patients. A lot of work has been done by a lot of people. Our program committee and administration has tried to:

Respect the Elders. Embrace the new. Encourage the impractical and improbable, Without bias.

We welcome you. Enjoy and let us know what you think.