Understanding Multiple Sclerosis & Alternative Approaches

Hi, it’s Dr Minkoff from LifeWorks Wellness Center. I want to talk about a condition that’s becoming more and more common, it’s called multiple sclerosis.

Sclerosis means scarring. Multiple sclerosis is scarring in many places. This happens to be scarring of the nerves that leave the brain that go to the rest of the body.

So this is considered to be an autoimmune disease.

So for reasons that are not completely understood, the immune system in the body and especially in the brain, attack the nerve cells and around nerve cells there is a sheath, it’s like a fatty coating.

It’s almost like insulation on a wire and that insulation makes the nerves conduct much faster.

So if it would take a second for a nerve to go from the brain to the foot, if it’s got this coating on it, it would take maybe a half a second or a quarter of a second. So it makes things go faster.

So this myelin at birth, there’s very little of it but as the baby grows and matures the myelin is made by special cells in the brain and so it’s very important for our overall function.

In the last probably 25 years there is an increasing amounts of multiple sclerosis, where the nervous system in the body, in the person, is triggered to attack this myelin, this sheath is called myelin and it’s made out of some fatty at what are called fatty acids.

They’re, they’re sort of a fatty substance, kind of like cholesterol and they’re oils and they make up this coating.

Now if the nervous system attacks them and then in healing, so they’re damaged and then they scar when they’re healing, then the nerves don’t function right and so sometimes people with multiple sclerosis will have visual problems, they might have weakness or tingling of an arm or leg or both legs, they might have disco-ordination so they can’t walk straight and in traditional neurology there really is no it’s caused by this.

Virtually all of the treatments that are used for multiple sclerosis are treatments that suppress the immune system.

So the immune system has been triggered to attack these nerve cells or this sheath around these nerve cells and when they’re triggered to attack if you could give very powerful drugs to block the immune system, then they don’t attack them as well and it may get the condition to calm down.

Now sometimes if the onset of this is very fast and it sort of devastating the patient, a five or ten day course of steroids, these are the drugs that are used mainly to cool this off, might as an emergency treatment be worthwhile.

For long-term treatment of multiple sclerosis the major problem is nobody has been able to figure out why is the body triggered to do this in the first place.

What we’re doing here at LifeWorks and we’ve seen many patients with multiple sclerosis and the vast majority of them stabilize their disease and many of them heal because what we’re looking to do is find what has happened in that person’s body, they might be 20 or 30 or 50, and they didn’t have any of this and then something triggered it.

Now the body is very intelligent and it never really does something for no reason.

So what’s happening is that the body’s immune system is trying to, as a protective action uncorrectly, attack this myelin.

What we find when we look at people very carefully, is there are factors which trigger this. Sometimes they’re infections, Lyme and Lyme co-infections are very common, heavy metals can do this, other sorts of bacteria can do this, other biotoxins like chemicals, pesticides they can do this, where the immune system is triggered and it looks to the immune system like this sheath is a bad guy and gets attacked.

So if we do this and at the same time give other nutrient type therapies to help heal nerve cells, give nerve cells a trigger to to grow and grow new ones, we can most often get people who are limping or weak or in wheelchairs to be able to get much improvement.

Now sometimes it’s amazing and they start walking again.

Sometimes their limp gets better or goes away but when we look six months, twelve months down the line and we repeat the MRI scan, which showed areas where there’s damage to these nerve cells or this myelin sheath that we see this stabilizes or starts to heal in, so the white spots, the sclerotic parts actually are improved and they get better.

So I think if you have an emergency, yes get regular care.

Once you’re stable, come here because things like hyperbaric oxygen and ozone and IV nutrition, we can really usually help someone and get them to a much better place. Hope this helps.