Ireland: island of saints and scholars. Although in the interests of full disclosure not all of its 5 million inhabitants are necessarily either saintly or scholarly, the visitor to its shores will certainly find many footprints of Ireland’s tradition of folklore and stories. The island’s temperate climate is nourished by the Gulf Stream, turning the landscape into a lush green onto which are embedded imprints of Ireland’s cultural past, typified by the extraordinary Neolithic tomb at Newgrange.

It is a dream of neurologists to cure degenerative diseases. The big brothers, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease have always been a huge burden of the population but are now, in the millennium of increasing population age becoming a scourge of humanity. While everybody is acknowledging this, both PD (1) and AD (2) communities of clinician researchers and basic researchers are preparing to attack the problem fundamentally frequently unnoticed by the general neurology community.

As you may have seen the NEW Guideline:  EAN guidelines on central neurostimulation therapy in chronic pain conditions has just been published in the October issue