Multiple Sclerosis. Another miracle cure? Or another dangerous blind alley?

Conventional medicine is always coming up with new miracle cures for diseases, and the latest in a treatment for MS, or multiple sclerosis. The media has, as usual, heralded this new treatment as "a game changer", with BBC News announcing

               "Doctors say a stem cell transplant could be a "game changer" for many patients with multiple sclerosis. Results from an international trial show that it was able to stop the disease and improve symptoms."

This is, indeed, good news - if it is true. According to the National MS Society, MS was first identified in the mid-19th century, and since then MS has probably become the most widespread disabling neurological condition of young adults around the world. According to this HealthLine article, there are an estimated 400,000 cases in the USA (with 200 new cases diagnosed every week), and 2.5 million cases throughout the world. And all this without there being any known cause!

The hopes of all these people will undoubtedly have been raised, and from the media coverage there appears to be no reason for these hopes not to be raised. But when the treatment is described it is more concerning. Conventional medicine is playing around with our immune system again - the immune system that is designed to keep us all healthy!

• The treatment involves wiping out a patient's immune system using chemotherapy drugs. The immune system is destroyed, we are told, because it is already faulty.
• The immune system is then "rebooted". Stem cells are taken from the patient's blood and bone marrow are re-infused. As these cells are unaffected by MS they rebuild the immune system.

So another disease, which now affects an unprecedented number of people, is likely to bite the dust. In a few years time MS will be an ex-disease. 2.5 million people will have had their immune system 'destroyed' and 'rebooted', and they will all be well again. That is, of course, if there is enough money to spend on tinkering with the 2.5 million immune systems. And if there are enough people who want to have their immune systems 'wiped out' and 're-infused'.

So I will publish this blog today, and wait to see the outcome of this breakthrough treatment.

Expect to hear from me again in a couple of years with up-to-date MS statistics!

But first, another suggestion for treatment, and one for prevention too.

Treatment

Homeopathy has been treating people with MS for as long as MS has been diagnosed, and it does so without having to 'destroy' or 'wipe out' anything, leave alone a system that is designed to keep us healthy. I have discussed this, and compared conventional and homeopathic treatment, in more detail on my 'Why Homeopathy?' website.

Prevention

As is so often the case, conventional medicine says that it does not know what causes MS, but states categorically that it is an 'autoimmune disease'. So something has affected our immune system, but doctors are unable to tell us exactly what it is that has done so. So could it possibly be something that conventional medicine has already done to interfere with our immune system? After all, there are pharmaceutical drugs that are designed to do just this. And there are drugs and vaccines that do so as a 'side effect', including those known to cause MS.

So perhaps the best answer to MS is to stop taking pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines altogether, and to use safer and more effective medical therapies instead. I, for one, would like to hold on to my immune system!

A Cure for Multiple Sclerosis? Conventional medicine discovers Homeopathy - again!

The headline rings out in the MediCures website. "British researchers may have just found the cure for multiple sclerosis!

Great news, surely? Or is this just another over-hyped 'cure' heralded by conventional medicine. They have done it so many times before, and they never seem to materialise. The article explains further"

          "A new study published in the journal Nature Communications shows that scientists may have discovered a way to stop autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or Type 1 diabetes by retraining the immune system. The study was published by researchers from Bristol University, and shows that the immune system can be taught to stop treating harmless everyday proteins as if they were dangerous invasive diseases.

Ahh! A problem. "We (that is, medical science) can teach the immune system!" That sounds like the typical arrogance of conventional medicine - "we know better than the body", "we can do better than the body", "we can force it back into health by our cleverness". Yet we must read on....

          "In Multiple sclerosis (MS) the immune system attacks the myelin sheaths which protect nerve fibers. These nerves carry messages to and from the brain, and if they are disrupted, it leads to a host of problems such as loss of mobility, vision impairment and fatigue. By synthesizing proteins from the sheaths in a lab and then injecting them into the blood stream at increasing doses, the body begins to learn that they are safe and no longer attacks them."

The name for this type of therapy, apparently, is allergic desensitisation. The article, correctly, says it has been used for treating some allergies. But in fact, what this conventional medical research has stumbled on, as it has done before, is homeopathy.

Homeopathy, at its simplest, is a medical therapy based on the principle of "treating like with like". And this is what this technique clearly does. It does so clumsily, and with too much complexity. But this is, in fact, what it is doing - using something that is causing the problem to resolve the problem. Listen to the description of the study’s author, Dr. Bronwen Burton.

          “The immune system works by recognizing antigens which could cause infection. In allergies the immune system mounts a response to something like pollen or nuts because it wrongly believes they will harm the body. But in autoimmune diseases the immune systems sees little protein fragments in your own tissue as foreign invaders and starts attacking them. What we have found is that by synthesizing those proteins in a soluble form we can desensitize the immune system by giving an escalating dose.”

It would have been nice if the authors had paid tribute to homeopathy, but with the conventional medical establishment in crisis, and wanting to undermine homeopathy whenever it can, this is not surprising. And for the patient it matters little. A cure, is a cure, is a cure. And conventional medicine has so few.

This is my fourth blog about how conventional medicine is now utilising homeopathic principles. The first, "Superbugs. Homeopathy is proven to work - treating like with like" concerned the treatment of Clostridium difficile. The second concerned a new treatment for peanut allergy, "Peanut Allergy Treatment - another success for Homeopathy". The third, "Dust Mite Allergy.  A new conventional treatment - and it's homeopathy?" concerned another allergy treatment.

It seems that conventional medicine has decided that as it cannot beat homeopathy in either its safety or effectiveness in the treatment of illness, it has to join it. Fine. We should all be pleased with a late convert. But it the conventional medical establishment were not always attacking homeopathy, it would quickly learn that the treatment of illness is much simpler than some of the complicated procedures they come up with. Still, it is learning, however slowly!