Oct
31
‘I thought I was alone with my MS’
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When Shiv Sharma was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis he was the only South Asian he knew with the condition.
“I got a bit of a shock at the time,” he said.
“I honestly thought I was a bit of a freak. It took me a good few months to come to terms with it.”
Now, seven years later, about 12% of the MS patients treated at London’s Charing Cross Hospital are of a South Asian background.
Dr Omar Malik, a consultant neurologist at Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust, said he now wanted to know why UK-born South Asians, such as Shiv, seem to be more susceptible than those who migrated to this country as adults.
“South Asian MS is now becoming a common problem in the UK,” he said.
read the rest via BBC NEWS | Health | ‘I thought I was alone with my MS’.
Oct
25
Oregon candidate uses Segway to help deal with MS
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SALEM, Ore. — Bill Bradbury isn’t just running for Oregon governor. He’s zipping — on a Segway.
Using the personal transporter is one way the Democratic politician deals with the effects of multiple sclerosis. He was diagnosed with the disease 30 years ago, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of the most exuberant and popular figures on Oregon’s political scene.
Tall and lanky, he glides into campaign events on his electric standup vehicle, his booming laugh often heralding his arrival.
The disease has affected his physical skills, he says, but not his mental abilities or his capacity to govern.
“I get energized by the challenge of this campaign,” he says. “I really feel like the disability doesn’t interfere with my ability to serve the people of this state.”
The National Multiple Sclerosis Society in New York says Bradbury is the only candidate with MS running for a statewide office in 2010 that it knows of. Spokeswoman Arney Rosenblat said the group is delighted Bradbury deals openly with his condition.
“He certainly is a role model, particularly for people who are newly diagnosed with MS and may be uncertain about their future,” Rosenblat says. “It’s important for them to see that they can fulfill their potential and pursue their dreams.”
She notes that Bradbury isn’t the only officeholder with MS to achieve prominence, citing two former members of Congress, Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas. A current member of Congress, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy of Ohio, was diagnosed with the disease in 2003.
read the rest via The Associated Press: Oregon candidate uses Segway to help deal with MS.
Oct
22
Typically lost in the policy debate is the fact that health care, at its core, involves intimate, personal relationships between patients and their doctors. Those roles are usually narrowly defined, but sometimes it becomes necessary to cross traditional lines in order to forge a therapeutic, and ultimately compassionate, connection.
Anne Brewster, a Boston internist, has multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system. One day, she decided to risk disclosing something about herself to a patient:
“I have the same disease,” I told my patient over the telephone. There was a pause, and then a sigh. “That makes me feel so much better,” she said.
I was speaking to Ms. R, a soft spoken 30-year-old female with gentle brown eyes whom I had seen the previous day in the urgent care clinic where I work. She had come in complaining of difficulty remembering things. “I am in the middle of speaking and I suddenly forget what I am talking about, or I can’t find the words to say what I want to say,” she had told me.
“My husband and my friends say that I am not acting like myself.” We spoke further. A few months back, she had noticed a feeling of unsteadiness when walking, “like the world was off kilter,” but this had since improved. And perhaps she had been more clumsy than usual lately, dropping things. “I know something is wrong and I am frightened,” she had said.
She had a left-sided Babinski sign on exam–her big toe flexed upwards toward the top of her foot when I stroked the bottom surface with my thumb, a normal reflex in infants but pathological in adults, and evidence of damage to the central nervous system. I ordered MRIs of her brain and spine. The studies were done the following day and showed numerous demyelinating plaques consistent with Multiple Sclerosis.
read the rest via Boundary Issues: A Doctor With MS Confides In Her Patient | CommonHealth.
Oct
12
“Cyber support”
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Very good profile of the woman who founded MS World:
For Kathleen Wilson, multiple sclerosis came on like a flash of lightning.There was, in retrospect, a rumble of warning when she experienced some blurriness of vision while attending a professional seminar; an ophthalmologist’s check didn’t reveal any problems.But the next day when she woke up, “I had bilateral vision loss,” Wilson says. “Shapes were completely washed out, and everything was white on white.”
What Wilson experienced that morning in 1988 — and which took nine months to completely resolve itself — was optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve.
[snip]
In Wilson’s case, not only did the optic neuritis eventually disappear, “It got completely better,” she says. “I went into remission for six years.”With a background in marketing, she moved to Washington state and worked for 18 months for the nonprofit Hanford Health Information Network, assisting people who had lived downwind from the long-defunct nuclear plant. After that, she moved to Athens, Greece.
“I went for six months and stayed four years,” Wilson says. She studied the language, honed her photography skills and jumped off bleached rock cliffs into the Mediterranean.
Then, in 1995, the MS returned.
“It started with my right hand. Suddenly, I couldn’t write,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh, no, is it the MS coming back?’ After that, it progressed really quickly.”
Read the rest via Living: Health & Fitness | “Cyber support” | The Register-Guard | Eugene, Oregon.