It has been both challenging and rewarding to have had an uncommonly broad consultant career in rheumatology and pain medicine, adult and paediatric.

I began the modern Department of Rheumatology at St Vincent`s Hospital in 1974. From 1984, I was working on too many fronts while raising a family, and it was in the Department`s best interest for Milton Cohen to take over as Chairman, and the Department continued to flourish. By the early 1990s, our Rheumatology team headed The Department of Medicine (Prof Peter Brooks), The Department of Clinical Pharmacology (Prof Richard Day), The Department of Pain Medicine (Dr, now Prof, Milton Cohen), the Bone and Calcium section of Garvan Institute (Dr, later Professor, Philip Sambrook while Prof John Eisman was on Sabbatical leave), and had roles in Immunology.

The opportunity for a full-time hospital staff or academic position did not occur, and I remained in private practice. While that seemed disappointing at first, there were advantages. I learned a lot about people and their vocations, with patients ranging from the highest end of achievers to the most ordinary (both ends of the spectrum were very interesting).

After training in paediatric rheumatology in UK and USA, I began a Paediatric Rheumatology Clinic at Prince of Wales/Sydney Children`s Hospital in 1975, and continued that for about 35 years. It was a pleasure to work with Prof John Ziegler and Dr John Feller for most of this time. We became the 3 grandfathers.

The Pain Research Unit at Sydney Children`s Hospital arose out of the Rheumatology Clinic, facilitated by John Ziegler. I founded the Pain Research Unit at Sydney Children`s Hospital in about 1986. Though small, this is an internationally well known research unit, staffed by 2 research scientists as well as my honorary contributions, and we have had many international students and trainee doctors in paediatric pain medicine visiting or working with us. Our first publication (Bieri et al, 1990) introduced the internationally supported Faces Pain Scale which became a citation classis (1051 citations, the third most cited publication in paediatric pain 1975-2010. Also 993 citations of the derivative paper, an international paediatric pain measurement standard developed by our Dr Belinda Goodenough in collaboration with Canadian Colleagues, The Faces Pain Scale – Revised: toward a common metric in pain measurement. Pain 2001; 93:173-183). Working with Garry Graham, Richard Day, and John Ziegler, we achieved substantial advances in the chemistry, cellular metabolism, pharmacology and therapeutics of the antirheumatic gold complexes.

The 10 publications, reviewed in the final publication in Metal Based Drugs in 1994 (Reference 49) led to my MD by published work. My long-term involvement in research while working full-time in private practice is uncommon in the modern era. As a private practicing medical practitioner, it was difficult to spend long hours on honorary research, and my publications reflect the assiduous application of teamwork. Only 5-8% of my personal contribution to research since 1975, resulting in the most of the 136 listed publications, was funded. The remainder has been honorary/pro bono.

On 11 June 2018 I became a Member in the General Division of the Order of Australia for significant service to medicine in the field of paediatric rheumatology, and to medical research and treatment of musculoskeletal pain.