About one million Quebecers suffer from migraines and while new medicine helping victims manage them is beginning to come to the forefront, funding for new research is hard to come by.
Elizabeth Leroux spent several years trying to set up a specialized migraine clinic at the Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM). She tells La Presse efforts to procure funding and staff kept falling through, and she eventually went out west to set up a similar clinic at the University of Calgary.
Leroux is the author of "Migraine, Beyond the Headache" and says there are dozens of specialized clinics across the United States and Europe but very few in Canada. She says that while patients can pay out of pocket for medical injections to ease their headaches, that is no longer allowed in Quebec.
La Presse visited a migraine clinic in the US, and says it staffs 15 doctors and about a dozen full-time administrative and support staff. By comparison, the Montreal Migraine Clinic at the Maisonneuve-Rosemount Hospital has seven full-time doctors and just four neurologists and one nurse, all of whom are part-time employees.