Farewell Words from EHF President

I am happy I have had the honor of serving the European Headache Federation in these two years, and the opportunity to ferry it towards a new identity. The journey of independence started from the port of Athens in 2015, made a stop in Rome, will soon be in Florence and then will stop again in Athens and in Berlin. In this period the whole Board has shared the same vision of the EHF as the beam of a new European culture of headache diseases, based on the construction of a new way of spreading science, culture and clinical expertise. Starting from the bottom, involving the younger generations, not only those who have had the luck or the fate of growing in the shadow of the giants, but going to find new talents in a period where research on headache languished.

We have used the School of Advanced Studies to train and promote them from Junior Fellows to Teachers, The Journal of Headache and Pain to change them from newcomers to scientific writers, and the Congresses to offer them the opportunity to move from the poster area to the stage, where they can leave the fear of being young and therefore erroneously considered not yet mature.

Congresses: explosives, parallel, competitive, innovative, they have given motivations to those who languished without courage in the second lines. All, on the basis of their objective scientific level, have taken the stage, used this agorà to grow and grow their interlocutors.

Science, intended as a compromise policy among few Key Opinion Leaders, has been far from this period of the European Headache Federation and I am sure this will not ever change. 

Paolo Martelletti