scorpion wrote:
I hope you don't think you are going to worm your way out of this one Lyon!!!
Now THAT is the definition of a "groaner" oooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh!
sou wrote:Reading J. Murray's book "MS: The history of a disease" I was impressed by the number of past references about symptoms resembling MS in history. Let's say St. Lidwina. Anyway, the life expectancy was not tha high, either.
Although he is vilified here on thisisms for his take on ccsvi, I like that book also sou. If nothing else he obviously knows his MS history or is good at researching it.
Regarding life expectancy I'm assuming your point is that in times of old maybe people didn't often live long enough for MS to become obvious because onset is in the thirties on average? Truth is "a good long age" has remained about the same, at least through civilized history. Sure, in early history and hard times frailty was a death sentence when survival of the fittest was the rule, but for many hundreds-thousands of years if you were lucky enough to survive childhood and avoid epidemics and disasters you could still live to be as old as we do now days, plenty old enough to get MS. Considering that 100 years ago Mothers quite often died during childbirth, a large percentage of children died before puberty and there were no antibiotics and no clear perception of germs or their consequences and life expectancy being based on average age at death makes it seem that old age was 36 years old but that is a misconception.
sou wrote:I was impressed by the number of past references about symptoms resembling MS in history. Let's say St. Lidwina.
Not just by Jock Murray's accounts but also others I've been impressed by that too and that is hard to ignore and foolish to not take into consideration.
Although there seems to be the conception that someone has stated that MS didn't exist at all before a certain point in time, I have never read that. I've read the sorts of histories that we all have (
http://www.mstrust.org.uk/atoz/history.jsp ) in which earlier cases are suspected but unprovable, Charcot's defining MS as a definition much as what we consider it today and that (in Northern Europe and Northern US) MS incidence has drastically increased per capita since the late 19th century and steamrolling after the end of WWII. What I haven't ever read is anyone saying or hinting that what we know as MS didn't exist at all before a certain time.
But of course your point is that
IF the loss of the parasites our immune system has evolved to tolerate had anything to do with the incidence of MS, why would there be any cases of MS in times when parasite infection was ongoing and the natural human condition?
Like you I do think that MS has existed throughout human history but I also think that even during those times it was possible for royalty and rich important people to live a lifestyle which didn't allow parasitic works to complete their life cycles. Admittedly a wrench in the works could be that poor people didn't have medical help available and might not have been documented in the history books even if they did get MS but equally and maybe more likely is that royalty and rich important people wore shoes and long clothes, didn't live in close quarters with parasite infected people, often had pit toilets and likely had a higher quality food source than common folk which wasn't fertilized with parasite infected human waste.
With that in mind maybe MS has existed to a degree through history and possibly the only reason we hear about royalty and rich important people being affected is because maybe they were the only people back then without parasites and led to MS?
At any rate it's all an interesting concept and what really makes it interesting is that when you reintroduce helminth parasites to people with immune dysfunctions it has made marked differences in multiple different autoimmune/inflammatory diseases.
