Convenor: Rick Schmidt
Scientific Chair: Tony Stone
ICS joined with IUGA, and the International Children’s Continence Society (ICCS) for a memorable threesome meeting. The Scientific committees of the three societies met together and somehow addressed the enormous task of producing a good meeting with combined sessions as well as individual programmes for the three societies.
The scientific chairs for ICS Tony Stone, for IUGA Mark Vierhout, and for ICCS Jens-Christian Djurhuus, did a great job. It proved difficult to combine because of the multiple interests involved and tended to be 3 rather separate parallel meetings, together with several plenary sessions.
The State of Art (SOA) lectures were given by Alan Wein, Chris Payne and Mike Chancellor on the Tuesday. The following day the SOA was given by J Levine on “Pain and Inflammation: neural mechanisms”. The third was delivered by Frank Hinman Jr, on the impact of piddling on the quality of life.
Ted Arnold recalls his discussing the architecture of the stalls in men’s toilets and how difficult this often is for the 30% of men described by Hinman as having ‘bashful bladders’ who have to sidle into a stall. He was calling for ‘blinker’ panels at least, to place between urinals to afford some privacy.
The social events included a welcome ceremony, and a rodeo and steak dinner at the National Western Complex.
Tony Stone noted “ICS/IUGA Gala Dinner Convention Center (‘Cabaret: Baxter Black, Cowboy Poet. Not a good choice for the international audience. Almost every table ignored the act despite Paul Abrams and me trying to shut people up. Baxter Black finished his act anyway, well he was being paid!!)”
Tony Stone indicated that the organization of the meeting was a bit difficult, not only because of the 3 ‘competing’ societies, but more due to geographic distribution of the organization. Rick Schmidt was in Denver, Tony was in Sacramento CA, and Joe Dwoskin worked in Lubbock Texas (we used the Texas Tech CME office). Despite this the meeting came off well. We believe we hit the 2000 participant mark for the first time in ICS history.
Despite any difficulties it was a very interesting scientific meeting and the usual good fun, one mile high.