Best 9 quotes in «multiple sclerosis quotes» category

A Healthy Immune system equals A Healthy body

All my memories of my father include some manifestation of his disability, even if none of us were quite willing to call it that yet. What I knew at the time was that my dad moved a bit more slowly than other dads. I sometimes saw him pausing before walking up a flight of stairs, as if needing to think through the maneuver before actually attempting it.

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease affecting the central nervous system (CNS: the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves). It is not contagious.

Currently, there is no cure for MS, but there are treatments that modify disease activity, slow the course of the disease, and alleviate its effects.

I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing. I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.

The association between the post-encephalitic syndrome and demyelination or incomplete myelination of the brain seems quite secure. And the fact that encephalitis -including that caused by vaccination- can cause demyelination has been known since the 1920's!

The finding that ME and CFS group had more functional limitations and more serious symptoms than those with MS [multiple sclerosis] provides additional evidence to the seriousness of ME and CFS.

There is no specific test for multiple sclerosis.  Its early symptoms - fatigue, loss of sensation, weakness and visual changes - are frequently misdiagnosed as psychoneurosis or an even more severe psychiatric disorder, such as hysteria, particularly in women. When doctors could find no organic cause for [Jacqueline Du Pré's] complaints, they prescribed a year's rest, and referred her to a psychiatrist... When she consulted a doctor in Australia about her tenacious fatigue and occasional double vision in her right eye, he dismissed her symptoms as "adolescent trauma" and suggested she take up a relaxing hobby.

About six years ago my family was affected by multiple sclerosis.