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"The YouTube Cure"
That's kinda cute!
The cure has to be working, we've cut the number of people with MS from 500,000 to
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Regardless, many people with MS, which affects at least 250,000 people in the U.S.,
That's a dramatic halving! At that rate, by this time next year, problem solved....
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As Daniel Simon, an interventional radiologist in Edison, N.J., says of the work: “It wasn’t Bob’s Journal of MS and Autobody Repair; it was the premier journal of vascular surgery.”
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Patients taking placebo have often reported substantial improvements, according to Mount Sinai’s Miller.
I looked into this. Regression to the mean. A known phenomenon. Drug studies of pwMS deliberately include patients with the highest degree of lesion activity. I would be excluded from these studies. That high degree of lesion activity is unusual and these patients are expected to experience a reduction in lesions even with no intervention, as they normalize or "regress to the mean." This is not a placebo effect.
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In the past year, for instance, hospitals in California, New York, Italy and Poland have offered the Zamboni treatment—at a cost of $10,000 or more because it is not covered by insurance.
In one of the ISET medpage articles, it was also stated that CCSVI treatment was not covered by insurance. Are they just assuming this? Or is that shoe about to drop? It's nervous-making.
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One thing in favor of Zamboni’s approach is it has a reasonable scientific rationale, which not all potential therapies touted on the Internet have.
At last, I have found the response I'd like to give next time this is compared to frickin bee stings. "What CCSVI has in its favor is that it has a reasonable scientific rationale, unlike all the other alternative treatments that you just named off in a long condescending string." (Maybe I should switch neurologists after all. Thinking about it.)
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Popular demand for an unproved surgical treatment for multiple sclerosis shows the growing power of social media to shape medical practice—for good and ill
Social media is a huge part of the story of how this has unraveled. Go TIMS.
All in all, the article has a negative slant but, hey, it's CCSVI in a major magazine. I subscribe to DISCOVER, maybe they'll do one better.