This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Community: Knowledge & Support

So my sister has MS. And the more i read about the more scarier it gets. Apparently all the medications arent all that effective.

If by "cure", you mean something available to people with MS and not just a lab discovery, I'd say it's highly unlikely that there will be a cure in the next 10 years. It often takes around 10 years for substances to go through the 3 phase clinical trial process and gain regulatory approval, and at best it takes around 8 years. So, to meet the 10 year deadline, the cure has to be in human trials already, or will have to enter trials in the next 2 years. It is possible, but it seems like a long-shot. But I still think the cure is just around Harryz's "long corner".

Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsden, the head of Merck, one of the world’s largest drug companies, told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s. It had long been his dream, he said, to make drugs for healthy people - so that Merck could "sell to everyone."

Gadsden’s dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth.

Using their dominating influence in the world of medical science, drug companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that define illness. Old conditions are expanded, new ones created, and the markets for medication grow ever larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness and common complaints are labeled as medial conditions requiring drug treatments. Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have ADD. When it comes to conditions like high cholesterol or low bone density, being "at risk" is sold as a disease in its own right.

Selling Sickness reveals how widening the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits, in turn threatening to bankrupt health-care systems all over the world. As more and more of ordinary life becomes medicalized, the industry moves ever closer to Gadsden’s dream: "selling to everyone."

The only present cure or near-term cure (less than 10 years at least) seems to be stem cell treatment with chemo.

I'm not sure that I would agree with your opinion on stem cell treatment. A person's immune system is literally wiped and a new immune system introduced with the stem cells. The chemo is to wipe out the immune system. It is a very high risk procedure and you can imagine what it does to a patient's entire system.

But the treatment is based on MS being an auto-immune disease and it's the immune system causing the damage in the first place. In the past few years that theory has really been questioned. If there is another cause to MS then stem cell treatment is a big mistake!

Harry

Hey Harry, I don't think it's so much opinion at this point as it is fact. There have been a few clinical trials that have proven the success of High Dose Chemo with HSCT. Though it may not be a permanent cure it has been used with great success as a treatment in patients who are still in the RRMS phase of M.S. The clinical trial findings using this method have been posted on this site so they are worth a look. In fact didn't your old friend Bromley go through something similar and proclaim that he had his life back and had no reason to visit this site again? Of course i'm paraphrasing here but it was something to that effect, no?

Welcome, Godot---


He's doing well now, no MS progression or new symptoms, reversal of gray matter atrophy, and he's in better health than before.


cheer

How are you sure of this?