| By: Ron Sauciron Picture yourself enjoying an early morning snuggle session with your kids who love to jump into bed with you and enjoy some early morning bonding with you and your spouse. As you attempt to get out of bed, however, you feel what seems like an electric shock that started at the base of your neck and progressed down your spine ending at your feet. Your whole body starts to tingle and your leg becomes numb. It's like bumping your funny bone but your whole body tingles and goes numb, not just your arm. This was a totally new experience, and deep down, you knew this was serious. Over the following weeks the symptoms continued to deteriorate to the point where walking became more difficult and climbing the stairs was almost impossible. After 90 days of agony and testing, you are diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis (MS). An inflammatory disease where the insulating covers of the nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord are damaged. This condition often cause disabilities and leads to damage to the optic nerve. Damage to the optic nerve can lead to hazy or blurred vision and ultimately the sudden loss of vision. As the disease progresses, additional symptoms like memory loss, intense pain, incontinence, extreme fatigue, and ultimately, the inability to walk can occur. So, you ask yourself, what causes this devastating disease ? And the answer is we don't know. We do know the cause of the symptoms, however. It's the result of the destruction of myelin (a fatty sheath that surrounds and protects nerve fibers in the central nervous system). As MS progresses, myelin deteriorates, leaving the delicate nerve fibers exposed. This causes the nerve fibers to lose their ability to communicate with each other which results in the victim experiencing pain, numbness, loss of vision, and a host of other discomforts. So your next question is if there's no cure what's the treatment ? Mainstream medicine's approach is the ABC treatment composed of three injectable drugs, Avonex, Betaseron /Betaferon, and Copaxone. This treatment is intended to stimulate the patient's immune system. There are two major problems with this approach, however. Number one, the ABC treatment is only effective 30% of the time. And number two, the side effects bring new problems to the table (like we don't have enough problems already ?). Then there's the extreme financial burden the patient hast to endure, between $10,000 and $30,000 a year. So if you elect to go with the ABC treatment you can expect to be injected with three drugs that are 70% ineffective, you will be subjected to numerous side effects and it will cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 a year (over $400 a week ). | |
" "
