MS: Probable Cause and Best Bet Treatment

BEST BET DIET BOOK
Scientific Papers

"MS: Probable Cause and Best Bet Treatment" Dr. Ashton Embry © 1996
Section 2: Introduction
In June, 1995 my 18 year old son was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) with confirmation coming a month later with a Magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) scan. Since that time I have been reading books, symposium volumes and journal articles on various aspects of this disease as well as visiting many informative websites. From the late 60s I have been a geological research scientist and this has served me well for analyzing the voluminous data and many interpretations and speculations for MS found in the literature. In geology I have dealt mainly with large, multifactorial problems (e.g. origin of the Arctic Ocean, geological history of the Canadian Arctic over a 200 million year time span) for which varied and mainly circumstantial evidence is available. I have spent much of my career synthesizing large, diverse and sometimes conflicting data sets into hypotheses and theories of earth history. In geology we are never absolutely sure we have the "right" answer but we never shy away from making an interpretation. For this we choose the simplest hypothesis which fits the data. This hypothesis becomes the accepted right answer ("truth") until a better (simpler) hypothesis is proposed or new data require a modification or outright rejection of the currently accepted answer. I have provided this background because a geologist's approach to finding an answer to a large, multifactorial problem such as MS differs significantly from that of the medical scientist. In medical research there seems to be only a "100% sure interpretation" or a "don't know" approach. My approach to the problem of MS has been to try to find the most probable cause of the disease by using published data on MS epidemiology (who gets and who doesn't), MS pathogenesis (how the damage to the body happens) and MS recovery (who has recovered from MS and how they did it). Surprisingly I could not find a single article or book which took this same systematic approach to solving the MS puzzle. The relevant data on MS epidemiology are presented in the first main section. In the next section all the proposed causes are listed and each is tested against the established epidemiological constraints to see if it is compatible with the data or can be rejected as a probable cause. This has led to the identification of a single factor, diet, which satisfies the epidemiological constraints. The basic disease process (pathogenesis) is presented in the next section. This is followed by a discussion which demonstrates that dietary factors can result in the known disease process. Finally a number of anecdotal accounts of recovery are noted and it is shown that diet revision played a major role in each of these recovery stories. This section is concluded with a recent first person account of an impressive recovery which was based on the diet revision suggestions presented in an earlier version of this essay. The next part of the paper deals with a suggested treatment which is based on the need for identifying pathogenic foods and eliminating them from one's diet. The treatment, which consists of diet revision and supplements, basically counters the effect of a harmful diet and helps repair the already sustained damage. In this section other environmental factors which likely contribute to MS and other treatments which may be helpful are discussed. I conclude the essay with my subjective views of current deficiencies in the MS research effort and what I believe needs to be done to remedy this unfortunate situation. I must emphasize this is my best interpretation given all the data I have found and it is open to revision or rejection when more data are obtained. The reader is encouraged to critically evaluate my arguments and interpretations and to decide if my conclusions have merit or not.
Section 3: What is MS?
There is solid evidence that MS is an autoimmune disease which means it is the result of the actions of one's own immune system on specific tissues in the body. For example when the immune system attacks collagen in the joints the autoimmune disease is called rheumatoid arthritis. There are almost 100 different autoimmune diseases with each one being characterized by immune-mediated damage to specific tissues. MS is characterized by chronic inflammation and damage to tissues in the central nervous system (CNS) due to immune responses (Van Oosten et al., 1995). More details of the disease process are presented in a later section. .
End section 3.