Can diet really help with MS

I was attracted to this article by Caroline Collard as my wife has Primary Progressive MS. I started to post a comment there but it got out of hand, hence this.

As well as there being no cure for MS, there are no treatments offered to relieve the symptoms of this type of MS. I don't know what it is like in other countries but in the UK, we were given the diagnosis and pretty much left to our own devices.

The only advice we were given is to have a 'healthy', balanced diet! When you begin to do research yourself, it is just the opposite. There is too much information. The problem is, who you believe and which diet do you follow?

I want to do everything I can to support my wife. If there was a diet proven to help, I would adopt it too, to make things easier. But you need a degree in nutrition to follow most of the advice and I would have to say that the results are unproven.

As far as I am aware, there have been no large scale clinical trials of any of these diets. I'm not sure how there could be. How could you get a statistically significant number of people to follow these different diets over a reasonable period of time and measure the results? How would you know how closely people had stuck to the diet? What about factors other than diet?

One of the problems with MS is the diverse range of symptoms experienced. Every case is different depending exactly where lesions occur on the brain or spinal cord. So much so that some people still don't believe that MS is a single disease. So, if people experienced a slowing down of progression or an improvement in the symptoms, how could you be sure that it was due to diet?

There were some specific diets mentioned in Caroline's article. One that I had heard of was the Best Bet Diet by Ashton Embury. He is a man whose son was diagnosed with MS, so he did his own research and came up with this diet . If I remember rightly, Mr Embury has a scientific and research background, but not in medicine or nutrition. Following the diet is supposed to have eliminated all of his son's symptoms.

We have a book by someone else who through diet, exercise and Chinese Medicine claims to have cured himself of MS. I am very sceptical of these claims of cures in individual cases. My own experience has been that doctors are very reluctant to give a diagnosis of MS. When someone seems to have been cured, I wonder if they had the disease in the first place. After all, no one thinks that doctors are infallible any more.

They have been of very little help to us. We go to see a consultant about every eighteen months. Well actually, we don't see Him, we see one of his minions. This seems to be more to do with compiling statistics for research purposes than being of benefit to us. You occasionally read something from them warning you off 'extreme diets' like the one above and alternative therapies. But they offer nothing practical themselves.

If there were proven, practical steps we could take to alleviate my wife's symptoms I would adopt them immediately. But to transform your whole lifestyle based on a leap of faith! Reading Caroline's article has reminded me of the need to improve our diet though and I am grateful to her for that.

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I would like to point out that I have no medical training myself. These are just my views based on being on the receiving end of the medical profession.

A last note. When dealing with important issues such as your health, be wary of information from the internet unless you know the source.