HarryZ wrote:
After several years of this I got to the point that I never got too excited about any "new discovery" that was announced. Most of the time it had to do with another new way of altering the immune system. Of course, these new discoveries never worked out in the long run. When the DMDs started to arrive in the early 90's and the CRAB drugs eventually got approved, there was more hype than ever before. The seminars turned to neuros pointing out on their charts how effective these new drugs were with the pharma reps standing in the background ready to cash in on their new immune system altering medications. The marketing and sales efforts put into these drugs were immense and the clinical trials "proved" they worked.
Harry
Some of the comments on here are amazing. I really don't understand how people hold the neuros and "big pharma" together in some sort of conspiracy to make money.
First off, neurologists (or any medical doctor for that matter) do not find cures for diseases. They simply apply the best treatment that is available at a given time.
As far as development of treatments for MS, this difficult to do when you have no idea what causes it. It is going to take a lot of trial and error, but you have to start somewhere. With each failure, there is knowledge that is gained which pushes forward the science. I guess "big pharma" could have not bothered developing treatments until a cure was found. But what about the people that these drugs have helped?
So here we are, complaining about how neurologists and big pharma have
taken advantage of PWMS and we shouldn't believe anything that has been discovered over the last decade of research.
For example, HSCT treatment is in phase III trials and is the only treatment that has a highly effective success rate (80%) of halting MS progression that is scientifically reproducible.
Or the amazing advances that have been discovered in regulatory T-cells that provide overwhelming evidence that MS (as well as all other autoimmune diseases) is driven by a defect in the protective role of the immune system against self reactive immune cells.
By the way, both of these discoveries could not have been accomplished without EAE and mouse studies.
So my big question is why has the HSCT treatment not had the same amount of hype as CSVI? It seems to hold a lot of promise yet is completely ignored by most people on this site. Maybe its because it proves that what they have been spewing all along is wrong and they don't want to admit it.