Health Makers: A Personal Battle With Chronic Pain Gives Rise to MigraineAgain.com
Paula Dumas’s own struggle inspired a wellness community to educate and support migraine sufferers.
Paula K. Dumas suffered from chronic migraines her whole life. They were so debilitating, she could barely get out of bed.
“At my worst, I was suffering 25 out of 30 days a month and taking 10 pills a day to prevent them,” says Dumas, 57, of Irvine, California. But the medication had terrible side effects: She had four miscarriages from migraine-related drug interactions and was hospitalized three times with kidney stones. “I can’t tell you how many tickets went unused and dates got ruined and kids’ events I missed because I simply couldn’t go,” she says.
In 2014, after 22 years in corporate marketing and business development at Disney, Apple, CNN, and Kodak, she decided to make a change. That’s when she and her husband, Karl, 61, created MigraineAgain.com, a website and community designed to help people cope with migraines.
“We’re trying to help people suffer less and live more until we can raise enough money for a cure,” says Dumas. “We don’t want kids to live the kind of lives we lived, with a round-trip ticket to the emergency room.”
One of their followers was a man named Carl Cincinnato, who lived on the other side of the world in Sydney, Australia. Cincinnato, now 36, who had worked in brand management at Johnson and Johnson, had wrestled with migraines since he was 20. He could have as many as six migraine attacks in a week. In 2013, while on vacation with his now-wife, he reached his breaking point.
A Billion People Suffer From Migraines
Cincinnato began researching migraines and discovered that more than one billion men, women, and children suffer from migraines worldwide, according to the Migraine Research Foundation. According to past research, migraines are more pervasive than diabetes, epilepsy, and asthma combined. And a report published in September 2014 in Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, found that there’s only one headache specialist for every 85,000 patients in the United States.
He also learned that migraines involve more than a bad headache on one side of the head. In about one-third of migraine attacks, both sides of the head are affected (although in some cases, especially among children and teens, there may be no headache). Most attacks include visual disturbances, vomiting, dizziness, and numbness or tingling in the extremities or face, according to the foundation.
A Virtual Event Attracts Experts, Researchers, and Celebrities
Not long after, he came up with the idea for the Migraine World Summit, a virtual event that’s free for the first eight days with an email registration. Speakers include migraine doctors, specialists, and experts.
The first virtual online summit was held in 2016 when Cincinnato interviewed Dumas. In 2019, they launched the first in-person onstage event at UCLA, which was live-streamed. It attracted over 400 people and featured three experts, as well as celebrities like actress Kristin Chenoweth and former football player Terrell Davis, both of whom suffer from migraines.
“It was a great depiction of how migraines don’t discriminate,” he says. “They affect people of all ages and races.”
After the initial period of free access, the Migraine World Summit is available on-demand for fees starting at $99, which includes more than 18 hours of video. This year’s event, the fifth, will be held in New York City in March.
The event was so powerful that Dumas and her husband joined forces with Cincinnato and now coproduce it with him.
“Carl and I both had a desire to give back and try to help other people avoid a similar fate and suffer less than we did,” says Dumas, noting that up to 50 percent of funds raised from the Summit goes towards their nonprofit partners. So far, they’ve donated more than $20,000 to migraine and headache nonprofits, groups, and foundations.
Both Dumas and Cincinnato say they’re suffering much less than they used to, which they attribute to education and research, and that they’ve been able to apply all they’ve learned to themselves.
“I’ve tried to take the advice I’ve learned and be an example for others,” says Cincinnato, who now experiences only about three attacks per year. “If more people knew how to manage migraines they’d also be able to do the same thing. Not everybody can be helped, but most of the burden is preventable with the vast majority of people. Remission from chronic migraine is possible.”