Last night (3/31/2015) I watched Episode 2: "The Blind Men and the Elephant" of the three-part PBS series, "Cancer: The Emperor Of All Maladies" (each part is 2 hours long).
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365450715/
There are so many comments that apply to MS as well as cancer:
@4:25… one great theme in cancer over the last hundred years, it's the men and women who said, "I'm not taking this anymore, I'm going to try something else." And that's how science and medicine are advanced – is by people refusing to take the status quo.
@6:24 Eric Lander, PhD, Director, Broad Institute: "Declaring war on something that you didn't understand at all was nuts."
@10:45 Susan Love, M.D., cancer surgeon: "When they didn't work, instead of saying, 'Hmm, maybe there's something wrong with this theory,' they said, 'Oh, we're just not cutting enough.'… But actually there
was something wrong with the theory."
@11:00 Bernard Fisher, M.D. Pittsburgh surgeon: "I began to think, 'Well, we really don't know much about this disease we're treating… Why are we doing this?'
@14.00 Fisher quoted as saying, "In God we trust; all others must have data."
@14:40 Susan Love, M.D.: "The people at the academic centers and the people that were really hard-core, they didn't change. They had put their whole life into this; to say that they were wrong to themselves – I don't think they could admit it, even to themselves."
@17:24 Fisher had reminded the field: that treatment without understanding the underlying mechanism… could do enormous damage.
@17:40 Susan Love, M.D.: "
What happens in medicine and the science is we come up with a story to explain our observations. And we get enamored of our story. And then we use that story to keep going on – it propels the research and it propels the kind of treatments you do. It's really only when you can't justify it anymore that we start to throw it out. But it lasts a lo-o-ong time… these stories."