

Venous Insufficiency in Multiple Sclerosis - tokenadult
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=6465

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stingraycharles
A friend of mine suffers from MS about 20 years and currently is in the later
stages of the disease. She heard about this last year, she was indeed
diagnosed with a venous insufficiency, and actually had the "liberation
procedure" done by dr. Zamboni himself. She hasn't seen a single improvement
since the operation (5 months ago).

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dandelany
Just to provide an anecdotal counterpoint... Ceci Ervin gave a presentation at
Ignite Boulder about her experience with the treatment, and her subsequent
improvements:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaTL_z2IakQ>

It's hard to imagine that her progress could be purely psychosomatic, but the
procedure is also obviously not a cure-all. We understand so very little about
the human body.

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carbocation
It's really unfortunate that this hypothesis has become publicized and hyped.
It's important that science be able to progress, and sometimes progress
involves significant backpedaling.

In this case, we have a slight epidemiologic association:

P(VI|MS)>0 The probability of venous insufficiency given that you have MS is
nonzero.

But we're left without most of the remainder of Bayes' formula - at least to
my recollection. Therefore, I can't even comment on the strength of this
epidemiological association.

This is ignoring the other more critical concerns that could be resolved by
prospective cohort analyses. Randomized clinical trials with sham as a control
could also be done, if you were pretty convinced that VI were really causing
MS.

I'd like to see more data, to be sure - but I really would have liked more
data before people submitted to remarkably invasive procedures such as this.

------
tokenadult
Submitted as a follow-up to a link pg posted a while ago.

~~~
ulysses
Thank you for posting this. The whole MS/CCSVI controversy has really enraged
me.

Whether or not there turns out to be some benefit for some percentage of MS
sufferers, the hype, conspiracy theories, and two-bit clinics all over the
place offering this procedure have done real harm. People have stopped taking
medicine that has been proven clinically to help, in order to have unproven
surgery.

It's easy to see why. None of the current medications cure the disease, or
even stop its progression. They only slow down its progress. And they all have
unpleasant side effects, and require injection (though an oral drug is
becoming available soon). And even though five or ten thousand dollars (the
surgery cost, when I looked it up awhile ago) may seem like a lot, the drugs
seem to all cost (very) roughly twenty-five thousand dollars per year.

But that just means that there's a ready population of desperate people to
exploit.

And that makes me angry.

