Multiple Sclerosis

Saray Stancic is an MD internist who had to learn about treating chronic disease the hard way. While a senior resident, age 28, she was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis with severe symptoms. The top doctors at her university medical center took over her care, treating her with multiple drugs which were very expensive and had terrible side effects. After eight years her disease was progressive so that she needed crutches to get around in spite of her ten medications which were tormenting her with side effects. She came across an article in a little read medical journal which reported a group of MS patients who felt much better if they ate blueberries daily. Desperate, she searched the medical literature for connections between diet and her disease. She was shocked to find quite a few, including research published decades earlier in a top journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, which showed a strong correlation between diet and MS (the work of Dr. Roy Swank which I have reviewed in an earlier blog.) Her literature search discovered other work confirming this strong relationship between lifestyle, especially diet, and development and progression of MS. Armed with this, she went to her kindly, paternal neurologist who told her that MS was genetic and she was wasting her time searching for miracles. Dr. Stancic returned to research done on MS to find that only 14-33% of monozygotic (identical) twins got MS if the other twin had it despite identical genes.

What's happening? As with all genetically caused chronic disease including cancer, epigenetics, the environment the genes are bathed in, determines if the genes are expressed and the disease actually occurs, progresses or improves.

Dr. Stancic stopped all her medications, changed to a totally whole food plant based diet, stopped working extra long hours, and slowly added exercise (she had been told not to exercise) as she could tolerate it. Very gradually she got better and was able to run a marathon seven years later. She changed her specialty from infectious disease to lifestyle medicine and was one of the first physicians board certified in this new field. She continues symptom free and healthy treating patients and teaching at her local medical school. Proper treatment of their own chronic disease is difficult for physicians since, even more than most Americans, they have been taught that all disease, chronic or acute, is best treated by pills and surgery.