Treating MS with homeopathy....

[kittynh]

My daughter has a friend at school , and I know the mom pretty well. Not close friends, but we've been to each others houses and talked on the phone. She mentions to me that she is having a really hard time as she was diagnosed with MS about 6 months ago. She is a vegan and an advanced Yoga teacher, so for one thing she couldn't believe she could even contract MS! She said she feels really weak, and is having a lot of "attacks" over and over. I offered to help out with her child, but mentioned that the other person I know with MS was mentioning how much better she has been doing on the newer drugs that have come out recently. She then says she is seeing a homeopathic doctor for her treatment. She also eats all sorts of weird things, including these mushrooms she grows herself. I was shocked, but said, "why don't I put you in touch with the other girl I know with MS?" They got in touch, and this woman was told she was causing greater damage to herslef by NOT taking the newer drugs with truly retard the advance of the disease. Forget it, when I saw her this weekend she could barely walk. She refuses to see a doctor, and she's a single mom. It's making my nuts! I know I can't do anything, but can anyone think of anything else I can try? It makes me sick.

[Lord Kenneth]

Unfortunantly, there is nothing you can do.

[SteveGrenard]

Visit the following website and especially read under the treatments tab. Have your friend do likewise. She should talk to other MS sufferers who are in remission thanks to a combination regimen of the newer drugs.

http://www.nmss.org/

Has this definitely been diagnosed as MS?
or is this just what the homeopath is telling her?

[Marc]

One of my best friends was diagnosed with it about a year ago. She hates shots, but takes them right on schedule, she says she is doing better now than she was a year ago.

As for your friend... I can only think of Randi's metaphor about finding a wounded person in the road. He would drag them to the side of the road and safty, if they crawled back into the road he would try to drag them out again. If they crawled out again he would let them be.

You've tried to give her good advice. Maybe giving them that website and putting her in touch with other people might help change their mind. But you should be ready to accept she might not change her mind.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Tell her that if she won't try real medication for herself, she should do it for her child.

~~ Paul

[Ed]

Tell her when she buries the cold, small, lifeless body of her child her experiment in "alternative medicine" will be over. Point out that it will be too late, unless of course she believes that she can talk to dead people. Then things will be just fine.

Great, don't kill an egg, kill your own kid. These people make me sick.

[SteveGrenard]

Originally posted by Ed
Tell her when she buries the cold, small, lifeless body of her child her experiment in "alternative medicine" will be over. Point out that it will be too late, unless of course she believes that she can talk to dead people. Then things will be just fine.

Great, don't kill an egg, kill your own kid. These people make me sick.

Uh?

[Ratman_tf]

Wait. The mother is treating her child with homeopathy and herbs and other such ******** instead of getting real medical treatment? Is that what's going on?

[SteveGrenard]

Yes, IS IT the mother or the child who has MS and is being treated by homeo etc?
That's what Ed seems to think by his post:
that its the child. I was not aware MS occurs in young children.

Did we miss something? kitty?

[Ed]

Originally posted by SteveGrenard


Uh?

She's a vegen, no eggs.

[Ed]

Whoopsie. Seems I read it wrong.

All of that rightiously indignant prose? Strike it.

Better yet, use it for some lunitic that in fact witholds real help from their child.

Whilst the accuracy of the target is questionable, the sentiment holds.

If an adult loon wants to kill themselves I say it is the natural selection process at work before our eyes.

Damn, I was self-clensingly indignant too. I was (if truth be told) hoping for Grenard to Google some cockamamie study. C'est la vie.

[SteveGrenard]

Dittus still won't admit he made a mistake. I was almost ready to go out back and see if a star would rise in the East but I guess not......Ed, you can indeed make a rubber stamp out of this.

[SquishyDave]

Maybe try what I tried with my Mum, some people are NOT pro-homeopathy per se, they really just think it's another type of herbalism.

It's counter intuitive that if you take a massive amount of "mecidine" something bad won't happen to you, and these people go by their intuition. So go to her medicine cupboard, and take every drop of homeopathic medicine you can find, all in one go, (provided you aren't allergic to the filler, like lactose or whatever).

Then when nothing happens to you, they might start to wonder.

[Yahweh]

Kitty, I recommend you be persistent.

Your friend, although it may not be her intention, is willingly allowing herself to be drawn into self-destructive beliefs. MS isnt a death sentence unless you do nothing about it, and these homeopathic drugs are the equivelant to doing nothing.

Homeopathic drugs are the equivelant someone telling you "oh, just walk it off". You cant walk off MS.

Invite her to the boards and make sure she gets real medical care.

[Ed]

Originally posted by SteveGrenard
Dittus still won't admit he made a mistake. I was almost ready to go out back and see if a star would rise in the East but I guess not......Ed, you can indeed make a rubber stamp out of this.

Steve, you really do have a reading problem

[Vitnir]

It's unclear to me if it's the child or mother who has the MS. If it's the child I hope there are laws against maltreating children like that in your country. Report her to the police or social authorities. If it's the mother who is sick there may not be so much anyone can do. Adults are allowed to kill themselfs out of religious beliefs or whatever. It's easy to slap a "stupid" label on a person like this but I don't think it can be explained so easily. Find out who she trusts and ask them to intervene? Otherwise she will hopefully be desperate enough to try even traditional medicine when things get even worse.

We can only hope for the best :(

[SteveGrenard]

Vitnire:

Its the mother. MS is extremely rare in children. It primarily is a disease of young to middle age adults - begins in childhood in only 3 to 5% of cases.

[tamiO]

Originally posted by kittynh
She mentions to me that she is having a really hard time as she was diagnosed with MS about 6 months ago.

Kitty,

If she was diagnosed with MS 6 months ago, this means she has seen a doctor. You diagnose MS with an MRI. Sometimes it takes a few years and a few MRIs to determine that it is MS.

I have to wonder if it was some new agey doctor that "diagnosed" her.

Find out how she was diagnosed.

edited to add: The other way of confirming MS is a spinal tap.:eek:

[Rolfe]

Steve and Tami make a very good point. If she's been properly diagnosed as having MS, she's seen a regular doctor. Sounds as if she has, actually, if she's been advised regarding up-to-date treatment. In that case she really needs to be urged to go back to that doctor/hospital and allow them to help her.

If she's only seen a homoeopathic quack, she urgently needs to see a real doctor so it can be determined for sure what's wrong with her - is it MS or isn't it?

Rolfe.

[kittynh]

GREAT ADVICE! OK I went over to her house today as it is "Fall Foliage Day" (they don't do Columbus Day in Vermont...)

She has been feeling awful for years! Then about a year ago she couldn't walk one morning and her vision was totally blurred. That scared her, and she had the spinal tap and MRI. Very clear the MD feels, and was confused that she had waited so long. She then went to her Yogi school in Virginia to set up some treatment plan...and she got better! I told her as far as I could tell MS does that, that's why it's a favorite with faith healers. I left her Randi's book about faith healers and showed her the web sites. It seems the treatments are really quite promising. she had one of her homeopathic meds out and I didn't take it as she told me how much it fcuking costs! I pointed out that her scummy ex would get custody of her child if she became too ill. She said she was going to give it "another year" and that's all I could get out of her. But I did get the name of the doctor who did the tests, and I know him! So, I gave him a call, and he's going to get involved. So, now I pulled her out of the road twice. But, it breaks my heart.

sorry I'm not clear, it just pisses me off! As for her daughter, guess who has never had a vaccine (very common in Vermont)...

once weekend all the kids in the class came down with a 104 fever! Being Sunday, we all ended up in the emergency room! It was like a class reunion. Monday morning MS mom comes in and talks about this high fever her kid had, but she had no clue as she doesn't have a thermometer. "A fever is natures way of cleaning the system". It was just a funky virus, but our kids all got Tylenol and a check out.

[Marc]

Good going Kittyhn!

Maybe some of those bad periods will be enough to scare her into doing the right thing. Good luck to you.

[Ratman_tf]

Originally posted by Yahweh
Homeopathic drugs are the equivelant someone telling you "oh, just walk it off".

Best summation of homeopathy... Evar!

[Pakaran]

Originally posted by Vitnir
It's unclear to me if it's the child or mother who has the MS. If it's the child I hope there are laws against maltreating children like that in your country. Report her to the police or social authorities.

Haven't, specifically, Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses been arrested after their children died of lack of treatment?

I know there'd been cases involving easily treated, but otherwise deadly, diseases like burst appendicitis here in the US.

[Rolfe]

Originally posted by kittynh
She has been feeling awful for years!
This makes better sense. MS is a very slowly progressive disease, and mild in the early stages. It didn't seem reasonable that someone newly-diagnosed should be as sick as you described your friend.

MS is scarily common in Scotland and I know quite a few people who have it. Some of them have been pegging along semi-disabled for many years. Sometimes they have bad spells, but then they usually pick up again. But these are people being treated. Going without treatment for years with MS is not a smart move.

MS is also something the woo-woos just love to get involved with. The patients don't die too often, so there's a long period of revenue avaliable. And as the symptoms tend to fluctuate quite a lot, it's a terrific opportunity. Person feels really rotten. Goes to quack. Some time later feels better. Whoopee! But in reality they'd have cycled into a better phase anyway. The tendency of people with this type of disease to go to quacks in the bad spells is one of the main sources of glowing testimonials there is. The same effect can occur with regular treatment too, which is why very careful trials with good record-keeping are viral.

False belief systems in medicine are often said to be harmless, and where the woo-woo is presented as truly complementary (that is on top of regular treatment) it may well be that the only harm is to the patient's wallet (and I suppose paying out to be entertained while the real medicine gets on with it is within a patient's rights). But when someone rejects medical help as a result of false beliefs, as in this case, it's far from harmless.

In England a celebrity's wife died a couple of weeks ago of what was probably a good-prognosis breast cancer because she rejected "chemicals" and swore to fight it with health food and yoga. There's only so much you can do and so much you can say. It's tragic when it's a parent who becomes unable to care for a child as a result of this sort of thing, but in the end it does become her decision.

It's the greedy, lying, manipulative, fraudulent quacks I'd like to string up. Some of them are probably genuinely deluded themselves, but on the whole I think they're just in it for the money. How dare they ignore a hundred years of genuine medical advance and peddle their unsubstantiated new-age drivel to sick people?!

Rolfe.