When is a gift actually a burden? Or when does a warm gesture actually give you a cold chill?

The Alberta Government has come forward with a big bundle of money to track the people with Multiple Sclerosis who have gone for CCSVI treatment out of country. A big bundle is the equivalent of $1,000,000 and, on first glance, I would get on my cowboy boots and start whooping "Yeehaw" and "Yahoo" and jump on the "round-em-up" wagontrail.

But if we look a little closer at this, if we take a look at the gift horse in the mouth, I wonder how this trial is going to pan out.

The University of Calgary, the University of Alberta and other experts will be partaking in this "observational study" to determine if the angioplasty treatments used to treat venous stenosis is actually safe and effective.

A online database will be set up, and Albertans who have been treated for this procedure, or who expect to go away for this treatment - which is not available in Canada - will be encouraged to report their results over a three year period. At the end of the three year study, the Alberta Government supposes it will have enough information to determine if treating CCSVI has value, and determine if they will then proceed with clinical trials of their own.

From the outset, the Alberta Government and the Alberta Branch of the MS Society of Canada don't agree on the number of people they'll be enrolling in the study. The Alberta Government estimates that 30 Albertans have gone for the treatment. The MS Society estimates that number to be around 100. Irregardless, the first challenge for the researchers will be to track these people down and convince them to volunteer for the study.

And convincing them might be the most difficult part of their job. The people who have gone away have done so without support from their health care system, including the majority of their primary health care providers, their neurologists. Many began their journey by going out-of-province to private clinics to have the veins in their neck examined by Doppler and MRV scans, giving them the ammunition they felt they needed to make a treatment booking that would take them out of country. They've paid for all of this out of their own pockets or with the help of generous donations from others, with most venturing off to destinations they'd never imagined visiting, like Poland or India or Bulgaria, to countries that were foreign in everything from language to food to lifestyle.

And once back home, many have re-examined the position of their provincial government and the MS Society which they had been such a big part of, and questioned why these institutions have been so slow to embrace CCSVI when so many people in the province where they live are suffering from this disease. They started talking amongst themselves, and on social networking hubs like Facebook and started sharing their treatment stories - and not just about CCSVI - and began to collectively feel like pawns in a chess game designed by big pharma.

And still they forged ahead, with protests designed to raise awareness, with letters to the provincial and federal Ministers of Health, to their MP's and MLA's, to the Premier, the Prime Minister, to the MS Society of Canada, demanding that the angioplasty treatment be allowed in Canada. They provided statistics, based on personal experience, of drug cost before treatment to drug cost after treatment to prove the financial benefit of supporting CCSVI. They've joined and started clubs to reach out and share their stories, experiences, address books and worries with others, in total honesty.

And now they'll be asked to contribute once again. I wonder how these jaded, former fundraisers will react when all they've seen to now is indecision and delays. And although we all know that the book hasn't been written yet on CCSVI best practices for either treatment or post-treatment care, we do know that enough people have been treated worldwide to glean a snapshot of the effectiveness of treating blocked jugular and/or azygous veins: all that would be required for that would be a fact-finding visit to Poland or Bulgaria to see their records. If the Alberta government had done that, the people who've been treated might have seen that as an olive branch and get in line to volunteer. As it stands, it looks like another delay tactic for another three year's of waiting.

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