Well the sports medicine conference season is approaching. Already the Americans have kicked off with AMSSM in Austin, Texas and ACSM in Nashville; soon the Scandinavians will herald the summer solstice with the international injury prevention meeting in Oslo and the season will wend its way south to the Australian, New Zealand, and South African meetings before returning north for the BASEM meeting in sunny Scotland.

For the well heeled traveller, attending as many meetings as possible certainly gives the opportunity to see much of the world. Throw in a few pharmaceutical company junkets and you can fill in the gaps. After all who needs to work?

It seems to me that the days of the mega-conference are waning. Conferences like the ACSM meetings are simply too big to survive. Having 10 000 delegates with 20 concurrent sessions at any given point in time coupled with an abstract book that requires a forklift to move and you start to get the picture. The first few times that you attend these meetings the typical conference novice really only can see 10% of what is on offer and the conference passes in a frenzy of hyperactivity. The next stage is of frantic …