Wow! What a welcome. Thank you all! Please read this. It's important.

[Guest guest]

(Note: This post concerns 2 medications, LDN and Desoxyn. Please see all the chapters at: http://sclerotics.wordpress.com/) 27. Miracle Cure? It's hard for me to believe it myself. For the last month or so I have been symptom free! No urinary urgency...No balance problems...No memory problems...No ADD problems... Huh?!!!!! If I had confidence that it would continue, it would certainly qualify as the "miracle cure" I have been seeking. Whatseems to have brought this state of affairs about (believe it or not)is my own research into medications, combined with my planning for theaborted ayahuasca treatment. I had been waiting fortwo months for UCSF to get its act together regarding the Tysabritreatment. In the meantime I had started taking a treatment calledLDN, (Low dose Naltrexone). When I went to ask forthe Tysabri, I also asked my doctor if I could try the LDN. I hadfound out about it online and there was lots of anecdotal evidence thatit had helped people with MS. At the time I had little hope it wouldhelp me, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try it too. Naltrexoneis a drug used to help recovering addicts. The only dosagemanufactured is 50 mg, so I had to find a compounding pharmacy to makeup the 4.5 mg dosage that the treatment called for. Becauseof the long delay in getting the Tysabri, I decided to wait until afterPeru before beginning it. It involves a massive infusion once a monthin a hospital. The thinking was that it was best to avoid mixing otherchemicals in my body during the ayahuasca sessions in order to avoidpotential bad interactions. Tysabri is considered a second linetreatment for MS. Although it has by far the best track record ofreducing relapses, (67% reduction as opposed to 30% for the otherapproved treatments) one needs to get special dispensation in order toget it. This is because Tysabri appears to interact with other immune-modulating drugs to cause progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), an often-fatal opportunistic viral infection. I had been willing to take the risk, though. I couldn't continue down the path I was on. Theother research I did was looking for a replacement for the Provogil. Although it made me feel more awake, it did nothing for my ADDsymptoms. Additionally, I need 400 mg a day of the stuff and I wasconcerned about potential interactions with the ayahuasca. Ibegan searching for a drug that would give me the most "bang for thebuck" in terms of effectiveness for the dose. That was when Idiscovered Desoxyn. This was the line in Wikipedia that convinced me to try and get it. Further,because the secondary effects of dextromethamphetamine hydrochloride(Desoxyn) are least among the amphetamine-class stimulants ormethylphenidate but the highest degree of primary effectiveness (i.e.,most effective at enhancing concentration and decreasingdistractibility, with the least occurrence of side effects), Desoxyncan be useful for patients who find other medications ineffective orfor whom the side effects of such other medications are too severe. Apparently, one needed to take three times the amount of Dexedrine to get the same effect as that provided by Dysoxyn. My doctor did not feel qualified to prescribe it so I went to a psychiatrist who treats people with ADD. He had never even heard of the drug, but after reading up on it, agreed to give me a two weeks supply as a trial. The bottom line? As a result of preparing for the ayahuasca cure, I ended up on LDN and Desoxyn and nothing else. I've now been on LDN for about 4 months and Desoxyn for about a month and a half. Inever expected the LDN to affect my ongoing symptoms. I was taking iton the off chance that it could help reduce my chances at a relapse. But one day I noticed I needed to pee and when I went to the bathroom Iwas amazed... It kept coming and coming! Thinkingit over, I realized that I hadn't had to pull over to the side of theroad to relieve myself for a long time. How long had it been? Twoweeks... A month... WOW!!! I couldn't believe myluck! It was the last thing I had anticipated. Thinking it over, Irealized that I hadn't had any real balance problems lately either. Was it possible the LDN had taken care of both symptoms? I could thinkof nothing else that could have helped. If LDN is that effective at such tiny doses with zero sideeffects, why isn't it the FIRST drug that is prescribed for MS? Clearly I was not the first person it had helped, but it wasn't evenrecognized by the FDA as being a legitimate treatment for MS. My God... There could only be one answer that made any sense. The pharmaceutical industry! Here's what Wikipedia says: Lowdose naltrexone (LDN), where the drug is used in doses approximatelyone-tenth those used for drug/alcohol rehabilitation purposes, is beingused by some as an "off-label" experimental treatment for certain immunologically-related disorders, including HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis [6] Parkinson's, cancer, autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis, and central nervous system disorders. Whatthey fail to mention is that naltrexone has been out of patent for 20years or so. It's available as a generic and even with the specialcompounding required, a four month supply cost me $25 copay. TheCopaxone injections, that I had been using when first diagnosed, cost$1,500 for a month's supply. The Tysabri would have cost around $3,000a month. I would have needed to keep taking either of those drugs forthe rest of my life. Ask yourself, if you were a drug company which would you rather sell? LDN at $10 a month or Tysabri at $3,000 a month? Beforethe internet, there would have been no way at all for me to even findout about the existence of LDN. As it is, it is never even mentionedon most of the MS sites. It is never mentioned as a treatment on a parwith the standard ones. And yet, in my case it wasclearly much more effective than the Copaxone which had left painfulcyst-like nodes everywhere I injected it which had remained for aboutthree weeks. That's why I quit using it. It was incrediblyuncomfortable and somewhat scary. The other main drugused for MS is Interferon. I had chosen Copaxone over Interferonbecause the main side effect of the Interferon is flu-like symptoms. Who the hell wants that? As I mentioned earlier, the Tysabri has been linked to fatalities from PML. Wikipedia lists its common side effects as fatigue and allergic reactions with a low risk of anaphylaxis (severe life threatening allergic reaction) headache, nausea, and colds. Given that it works without any side effects, why isn't LDN the obvious FIRST CHOICE for treatment of MS? Theexcuse given is that the evidence supporting LDN is merely"anecdotal," it never having been properly tested. Anybody want toguess as to why no tests have been done on it? All ofus have read about how the pharmaceutical industry is interested inmaking money rather than actually helping patients. Now I wasexperiencing it firsthand ! As big as a surprise as the LDN was for me, the Desoxyn was even more of a shock. Within a few days of substituting 20 mg of it for the 400 mg of Provogil I had been using, I was back to a fully functioningbrain. After two weeks and raising the dose to 40 mg a day I canhonestly say that I haven't felt or functioned better for as long as Ican remember. At least ten, maybe fifteen years. No more getting lost in town... No more forgetting everything...No more daily exhaustion at 5 PM...No more technophobia... It seemed like every symptom not handled by the LDN was knocked out of the ballpark by the Desoxyn. OriginallyI had asked for the Provogil because I wanted to avoid amphetaminebased drugs. All of us have heard about the problems caused by"speed." Its illicit use has been labeled an "epidemic" in the US bythe press. We're all are so scared of the stuff thatwhen I asked on the Patients Like Me forum whether anyone had triedusing it to treat MS related ADD symptoms, I was almost banned from thesite. All sorts of ignorant, hysterical attacks on me. And this wasjust for asking about it... The reason Ihad asked was that no one there knew anything about Desoxyn. AllDesoxyn is is pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine.... Speed. Idon't want to be addicted to anything. I don't want to be turned intoa toothless, manic scarecrow. I don't want to have to use more andmore of a drug to have it be effective. All of theabove are what we have been taught to expect from speed. Undoubtedlyit happens to some people who get hooked on the stuff. What I didn'tknow was that when used by people who actually need it, it has no suchside effects. Wikipedia again: As with otheramphetamines, the majority of these side-effects are uncommon intherapeutic use, with the exception of growth retardation in children.Desoxyn also has a higher benefit relative to the incidence ofside-effects than other amphetamines. Sothe bottom line with Desoxyn is that no one uses it because of falsefears generated as a side effect of the government's war on some drugs. Thisis really OUTRAGEOUS if you think about it. All my symptoms from MSwere made to vanish by two readily available drugs. Few MS sufferersknow anything about either of them. They go on spending thousands ofdollars a month on drugs with severe side effects that don't work aswell. I have got to get this information out to everyone... Talk about dana paramita! A chance to really help a lot of people out there has just been handed to me on a silver platter. Italso has handed me a real reason to finish and promote this book. After deciding not to do the ayahuasca cure, I thought that the bookwas probably going to die on the vine. The main interest of my targetaudience would have been in the psychedelic/spiritual aspect of my"miracle cure". Now, though the "cure" I accidentallydiscovered may be prosaic, it is available easily and for much lessmoney than what MS sufferers are currently paying for drugs that haveneedless, awful side effects. That is potentially much more helpful than anything I could have discovered with the ayahuasca. Soas a result of Bob's blowing me off, instead of losing my chance for amiracle cure, I discovered a cure that was right there all along. There's the twofold bonus of having a new raison d'être for this bookas well as a raison d'être for me. Lao Tzu summed up my circumstances in chapter 58 of the Tao Te Ching: Disaster is what blessing perches on. Blessing is where disaster abides. Who can say what the ultimate end of all possibilities will be? Appropriate means soon become unfitting. Good means soon turn to evil.