article by anne kingston
Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2014 9:33 am
we are so very fortunate to have her eyes and ears, heart and pen following this story. This column is a must read for anyone with MS, or anyone who loves someone with MS. The struggle between pharma backed neuroscience and the lesser recognized practice of phlebology and vascular research is very real."If there were a drinking game that called for taking a shot whenever the term chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency—or CCSVI—appeared in 2013 in a headline alongside “debunked” or “death knell,” we all would have been plastered well before New Year’s Eve."
cheerYet the vascular link to MS dates back centuries, as confirmed in a 2013 metastudy that reviewed 132 papers written between 1839 and 2012 and concludes: “While the controversy over venous disease in MS is new, the observation of perivenular MS plaques and venous theories about MS pathogenesis are as old as the history of MS research.” Where the report gets it wrong, however, is that the controversy over venous disease in MS isn’t “new.” A fascinating 1988 study, “Social constructionism and medical sociology: a study of the vascular theory of multiple sclerosis,” required reading for anyone interested in medical politics, traces resistance within neurology to vascular hypotheses of MS decades before Zamboni coined CCSVI. Its focus is on the “power inequality on the production and assessment of knowledge about MS”. Translation: neurologists determine what research is valid, so much so that rigorous research outside of the still-unproven autoimmune theory of MS has been dismissed while less rigorous science supporting the current prevailing paradigm has been embraced.