Dear friends and colleagues,
Welcome to the Malaysian Society of Rheumatology (MSR) website!
MSR is 21 years old this year. This is a very meaningful year to us as we have grown from a young society to become a well recognised society in this region.
In 1989, when MSR was first formed, the society had only a handful of rheumatologists. Today, the number of rheumatologists in the country has increased four fold. I would say it is one of the fastest growing subspecialty in Malaysia.
Rheumatology has advanced tremendously over past decade. This can be seen especially on the rapidly changing therapeutic options in most of the inflammatory rheumatic diseases e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, spondyloarthropathy and psoriatic arthritis. Now we have a lot more to offer to our patients.
We have migrated from era of ‘watch and see’ to aggressive and more targeted therapy, aiming for disease remission if possible. Unfortunately, the targeted biologic therapy is expensive for majority of patients and it is not readily affordable. This remains a big challenge to all of us!
Rheumatologists have also advanced in the field of musculoskeletal ultrasound. Many of the rheumatologists in the country are now trained and able to perform this well. MSR is working hand in hand with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to continue running training programmes in this field.
We are also actively involved in research in line with Ministry of Health policies. We have included the list of research and publications done by our rheumatologists and their trainees in this website. Hopefully this will help to provide some useful local data about rheumatic diseases in this country to the world. We will continue to encourage research and hope to have more collaboration between centres from the government, university and private sector.
I believe we will able to overcome any obstacles and challenges positively and we will also keep in pace with the rheumatology advances which have grown so rapidly over the last decade.
Best Wishes
Dr Gun Suk Chyn