Recently I was out socially and I bumped into someone I have known for about eight years.  She is a specialist physician and she saw my cane and asked, “What’s happened to you?”  I said I’d been diagnosed with MS and, with tears in her eyes she took me by the shoulders and said, sincerely, “You can beat this.”  I said, “No I can’t, it is a chronic, incurable disease.  But I can live with it.”  She must have skipped the MS lecture.

A downside to the internet is misinformation combined with how search engine rankings work.  If someone comes up with a radical, alternative cure for MS, it makes news, and then ranks well on search engines.  Everyone with MS is looking for a cure, and many MSers are willing to try anything that may work.  So, successful results through live earthworm and raspberry colonic irrigation may have people beating a path to that door.  A weird thing about some fanciful treatments is that they can appear to work on RRMS patients because a relapse can coincide with that treatment.

I am in touch with a number of MSers around the world and, basically, some drugs do wonders for some and nothing for others.  It is a mystifying disease.  The eventual cure (and it will happen) may well come from stem cell research, hookworms, bee sting therapy, traditional Chinese medicine, or Chronic Cerebro-Spinal Venous Insufficiency therapy (just throwing CCSVI in to impress!) but there are charlatans out there preying on the vulnerable.  I suspect there is one ‘respected’ neurosurgeon in the US doing this at present but I’m not going to name him here because that will just help get his search engine rankings higher!