Letter from the Editor
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This marks the 23rd issue of Migraineur since the magazine’s inaugural offering in the winter of 2016. This averages out to about 3 issues per year, and while we had intended to publish on a quarterly basis, the difficulties imposed by the pandemic required a temporary hold. This is the first issue to appear since the Spring 2024 issue, and this more recent lapse has resulted from a combination of factors.
For the past 6 years the publication and distribution of Migraineur has been supported financially by advertising typically derived from the pharmaceutical industry. In many cases, the companies supporting Migraineur have been relatively small and focused on one or two innovative migraine therapies such as rimegepant (Nurtec), the Nerivio device and Petadolex (the petasites nutraceutical).
There has been an increasing trend for the various companies in that industry to coalesce, with large companies such as AbbVie absorbing companies such as Allergan (itself no midget and in the migraine world best known as being the force behind the development of BotoxA for suppression of chronic migraine).
As the pharmaceutical companies have become larger and the “migraine franchise” for each often a more important component of the financial portfolio, marketing of their migraine products has been shifted from smaller independent entities such as Migraineur either to their own internal promotional divisions or outsourced to large independent marketing firms who have multiple clients and promote many and diverse products. Put simply, what I humbly propose to be an elegant instrument for patient education that seeks to “entertain as well as educate” – i.e., Migraineur – has been supplanted by television commercials featuring a Kardashian derivative which come with a price tag that would fund publication of this magazine for decades.
So be it. Just as in love “the heart wants what it wants”, so in marketing does the client utilize its marketing budget as it wishes.
The astute reader will note that this issue contains no commercial advertising, and perhaps that’s not altogether a bad thing. Regardless, given the value this magazine and its related “migraine Wikipedia” (see pages 16-17 of this issue) have had for migraineurs generally and migraine patients in our clinics, we will strive to keep the show running.
The biggest contributor to the uncharacteristically long interval between publication of the Spring 2024 issue and this one has been our working to develop what is turning out to be a popular companion piece to this magazine. Specifically, paralleling the Migraineur effort, we have developed a Substack post, “All Things Migraine”, which focuses on issues similar to what we address in the magazine but from what readers might find to be a somewhat different angle. Give it a look – you will find it to be more condensed than the magazine but hopefully a tasty hors d’oeuvre (or, for those of you familiar with NOLa, an appealing lagniappe).
