Welcome to Annual Congress

By Dr. Robert Worthington-Kirsch Chairman, AVLS 2021 Planning Committee

As some of you know, my life priorities start with God, my family and fly-fishing. That’s one of the reasons I am so happy to be planning the meeting here in Denver.

There are two approaches to fishing a river. When you are wading, you can only cover a small segment of water, but you take the time to pick the segment apart – changing tactics to get the best results from each hole, run, or seam. When you are in a drift boat, you fish in what looks like the best water in a section and are then on to the next section – covering more water but not taking the time to investigate every detail of any section.

To me, meetings are usually a lot like a drift boat trip. I only get to sample the highlights of any one timeslot and then on to the next segment.

A hybrid live/virtual meeting offers both a “drift boat” and a ‘'wading” experience. During the meeting, each of us can hear live the things that we think are most interesting.

After the meeting, every session is available for online viewing, so we can revisit something we heard live for more detail or attend sessions we didn’t get to during the live meeting.

I won’t push the metaphor any further, but there are several sessions that everyone will find interesting and valuable. On Thursday morning, our Keynote Speaker is Dr. David Lechner. David is a Medical Director for Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Montana and will be sharing with us how the payers need and use the kind of “big data” that the AVLS PRO Registry is generating. David also has a side gig as a drift boat guide.

On Friday morning, Dr. Scott Smith from NASA will be speaking about the experience of microgravity and how it affects lymphatic physiology and our understanding of wound management and lymphatic disease.

With our emphasis on data, we are dedicating a session to the Fundamentals of Research – giving our attendees the tools to start generating data on their own.

In addition to our dedicated abstract sessions, we will be having abstracts presented at other times and sessions to show everyone the data emerging from the Registry and other research projects.

There will be sessions led by our colleagues from the AVF and the international VLM community, giving us the chance to see how things work in other settings.

Returning to the river, it’s also critical to take a moment, stop fishing, and look around at the beauty of nature around us. Join us at the AVLS Taste of Colorado party on Saturday evening to see some of what Denver and the rest of Colorado have to offer and to support the Foundation for Venous & Lymphatic Disease through our Silent Auction.

We are going to have a great few days together and a lifetime of learning to come.

Enjoy the Meeting! Enjoy Denver!