All right.
Thank you very much to Dr. Beaudet for his input.
I think we all know that what is lacking, at least in Canada, through all the research and all the commentary that has been made, is that we need a treatment arm to test the hypothesis. Unfortunately, the $2.4 million that has gone out from the MS Society in Canada and in the U.S. does not go in the direction of testing the hypothesis that treatment will or will not improve the outcome of the neurological symptoms.
These are people who are basically living in a terrible situation of chronic and progressive disability and without any real treatment available to them. I think that both Dr. Zamboni and our colleague from Poland have suggested that this is not new treatment for us. We treat veins and arteries with angioplasty routinely. It has a low-risk and a very minimally invasive component to it. Most of these treatments are outpatient treatments.
So I would really urge the committee members, the government, and the appropriate funding agencies to look towards funding the definitive study that will answer the question, which is not whether MS has or does not have associated venous disease, but rather, does treatment of the venous outflow obstruction, as reported by Dr. Zamboni, improve the neurological outcome? This is very analogous to any drug that neurologists are asked to test. If you don't test the drug to the patient and investigate the outcome, you will never know whether that drug improves the outcome or not.
What we're doing with our funding, for some reason that is very difficult for me to understand, is that we're running around and saying, well, do people with MS have venous obstruction? Do they have anomalous venous drainage? We're wasting time and money, and we're certainly not helping our people who are going overseas to get treatment when we should be able to do the studies in a blinded fashion within Canada.
What we need is teamwork among vascular surgeons and neurologists who are competent in MS and who can independently assess the efficacy of the treatment. But we need to get going on this, so that within a year or two we can let our MS population know the answer.
[Applause]