REPORTAGE – The third floor of the Lariboisière hospital welcomes 10,000 patients who suffer from violent headache each year. Thanks to specific protocols, this little center little known to generalists brings them real relief.
Recrocal on his chair, Dinesh* grimace. Resolutely mutic, his face frozen by a grin of pain, the little man surrounds with one hand his head on which his fingers hammer at regular intervals. A muffled cough breaks the numbthful silence in the waiting room: at noise, Dinesh is tense. His leg wiggles, he blows hard, grips the arm of the girl seated by her side which rises and accosted – whispering – the medical secretary. “Madam, excuse me, but my father, there, he is really not good, he tells me to tell you that his headache is getting worse, I think you have to do something …”, She said, pointing to the fifty the fifties, who certainly does not speak French but strives to mimic with a trembling hand a knife that is planted in her eye.
There are several, the air as defeated as Dinesh, to wait this morning in the waiting room of the Cephale Emergency Center, on the third floor of the AP-HP Lariboisière Hospital, in the 10e District of Paris. Over a few tens of sieved square meters of green lighting, here extends the only center of France specialized in the processing of headaches. Little known to general practitioners and the patients themselves, this small center welcomes some 35 patients in crisis every day, for whom it constitutes a formidable hope of obtaining, finally, a diagnosis.
