Sclerosis Quotes

ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but she has replaced that with her own version-Always live strong

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

I was inspired to write (Life Continues) to tell people dealing with MS or any other illness that if opening your eyes, or getting out of bed, or holding a spoon, or combing your hair is the daunting Mount Everest you climb today, that is okay.

one had multiple sclerosis and

I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing. I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease affecting the central nervous system (CNS: the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves). It is not contagious.

But it conveys the message that addiction is as biological a condition as multiple sclerosis. True brain diseases have no volitional component.

Anyone not busy learning is busy dying. For as long as you foster a willingness to learn, you will ward off sclerosis of the brain and hardening of the mental arteries. Curiosity has led many a man and women into the valley of serious wealth.

He’s been told that his mentals are “treatment-resistant,” which sounds a lot like “noncompliant” heart disease or “won’t play ball” multiple sclerosis.

Currently, there is no cure for MS, but there are treatments that modify disease activity, slow the course of the disease, and alleviate its effects.

further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 – heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity.

Brace yourselves, girls: Soda is liquid Satan. It is the devil. It is garbage. There is nothing in soda that should be put into your body. For starters, soda’s high levels of phosphorous can increase calcium loss from the body, as can its sodium and caffeine. [Cousens, Conscious Eating, 475] You know what this means—bone loss, which may lead to osteoporosis. And the last time we checked, sugar, found in soda by the boatload, does not make you skinny! Now don’t go patting yourself on the back if you drink diet soda. That stuff is even worse. Aspartame (an ingredient commonly found in diet sodas and other sugar-free foods) has been blamed for a slew of scary maladies, like arthritis, birth defects, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes.2 When methyl alcohol, a component of aspartame, enters your body, it turns into formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is toxic and carcinogenic (cancer-causing). 3 Laboratory scientists use formaldehyde as a disinfectant or preservative. They don’t fucking drink it. Perhaps you have a lumpy ass because you are preserving your fat cells with diet soda. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received more complaints about aspartame than any other ingredient to date.4 Want more bad news? When aspartame is paired with carbs, it causes your brain to slow down its production of serotonin.5 A healthy level of serotonin is needed to be happy and well balanced. So drinking soda can make you fat, sick, and unhappy.

Medical communities believe multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease resulting from your immune system somehow confusing areas of your nerve sheath with invaders and attacking them. As I say in other chapters, this is a philosophy that will hold back the truth in medical research for decades. The human body does not attack itself. Pathogens are to blame.

My particular type, Primary Lateral Sclerosis, is rarer and slower than other versions and I should be grateful that I might live ten years if I’m lucky. Now

depression should be categorized with other inflammatory disorders including heart disease, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, cancer, and dementia. And

Morrie had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig's disease, a brutal, unforgiving illness of the neurological system. There was no known cure.

Joey broke the silence. “MS?” he asked. “Microsoft,” said Calvin. “Or multiple sclerosis. Computer programs everyone has to use, or a debilitating disease. That’s life, in a nutshell.

Processed, heated, and refined fats, as well as “trans fats” (hydrogenated fats), are the bad fats commonly found in foods such as margarine, shortening, your average American pizza, and the processed cheese so widely available in grocery stores. These bad fats have been linked to a higher risk of heart disease, macular degeneration, multiple sclerosis, certain cancers, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, infertility and endometriosis, and depression.3 (For more on fats, see chapter 16.)

The association between the post-encephalitic syndrome and demyelination or incomplete myelination of the brain seems quite secure. And the fact that encephalitis -including that caused by vaccination- can cause demyelination has been known since the 1920's!

In the absence of better information we can only hypothesize that many diseases such as multiple sclerosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and pancreatic cancer, as well as afflictions such as generalized lower back pain, are cases of evolutionary mismatch.

The entire cerebral mechanism can be reproduced mechanically. So much the better, as this will show the most obtuse of us where the error lies. But when we want to go beyond academic know-how—that sclerosis of the spirit—to fertile thought, the cerebral mechanism is no longer adequate.

A discourse approaches universality when it frees itself from its origins, leaves them behind, disavows them: having reached this point, if it would reinvigorate itself, avoid unreality or sclerosis, it must renounce its own exigencies, break its forms and its models, it must condescend to bad taste.

Only after many years will I recognize that I, too, have survived a loss, and not necessarily intact. The depression and multiple sclerosis awaiting me will suggest that changes in the structural level have already occurred by the time I learn to forgive Daddy for abandoning me without even saying good-bye.

The long history of human use of cannabis also attests to its safety—nearly 5,000 years of documented use without a single death.

Andreevich. “Don’t be angry with me, Misha. It’s stuffy in here, and hot outside. I don’t have enough air.” “You can see the vent window on the floor is open. Forgive us for smoking. We always forget that we shouldn’t smoke in your presence. Is it my fault that it’s arranged so stupidly here? Find me another room.” “Well, so I’m leaving, Gordosha. We’ve talked enough. I thank you for caring about me, dear comrades. It’s not a whimsy on my part. It’s an illness, sclerosis of the heart’s blood vessels. The walls of the heart muscle wear out, get thin, and one fine day can tear, burst. And I’m not forty yet. I’m not a drunkard, not a profligate.” “It’s too early to be singing at your funeral. Nonsense. You’ll live a long while yet.” “In our time the frequency of microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages has increased greatly. Not all of them are fatal. In some cases people survive. It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune. Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity.

A disease, Terry - the most widespread and life-curtailing disease of all! Forget cancer, forget multiple sclerosis, forget AIDS. If you spend eight hours a day in bed, then sleep is shortening your life by a third! That's the equivalent of dying at the age of fifty - and it's happening to all of us. This is more than just a disease: this is a plague! And none of us is immune, you realize.

Science is being corrupted by the influence of corporate money. This corruption is leading directly to our poor health, whether it be the epidemic of obesity; neurological diseases like autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis; the explosion of cancers; or mental problems among the young, including school shooters. There are some who claim this is leading to a culling, if not the mass extinction, of humanity.

Once he raised his arm to show his friends the back of his hand, where the veins were laid out in the shape of a tree, and he broke out in the following improvisation: “Here,” he said, “is the tree of life. Here is a tree that tells me more about life and death than the flowering and fading of tree gardens. I don’t remember when exactly I discovered that my wrist was blooming like a tree…but it must have been during that wonderful time when the flowering and fading of trees still spoke to me not of life and death but of the end and beginning of the school year! It was blue then, this tree, blue and slender, and the blood, which at the time I thought of not as a liquid but as light, rose like the dawn over it and turned my metacarpus’s entire landscape into a Japanese watercolor… “The years passed, I changed, and the tree changed, too. “I remember a splendid time; the tree was spreading. The pride I felt, seeing its inexorable flowering! It became gnarled and reddish brown—and therein lay its strength! I could call it my hand’s might rigging. But now, my friends! How decrepit it is, how rotten! “The branches seem to be breaking off, cavities have appeared…It’s sclerosis, my friends! And the fact that the skin is getting glassy, and the tissue beneath it is squishy—isn’t this a fog settling on the tree of my life, the fog that will soon envelop all of me?

Today, however, anti-vaccine activists go out of their way to claim that they are not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want vaccines to be safer. This is a much softer, less radical, more tolerable message, allowing them greater access to the media. However, because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots—conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines—safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made.

ASPARTAME AND MSG: EXCITOTOXINS Aspartame is, in fact, an excitotoxin, one of a group of substances, usually acidic amino acids, that in high amounts react with specialized receptors in the brain, causing destruction of certain types of neurons. A growing number of neurosurgeons and neurologists are convinced that excitotoxins play a critical role in the development of several neurological disorders, including migraines, seizures, learning disorders in children, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).1 Glutamate and aspartate are two powerful amino acids that act as neurotransmitters in the brain in very small concentrations, but they are also commonly available in food additives. Glutamate is in MSG, a flavor enhancer, and in hydrolyzed vegetable protein, found in hundreds of processed foods. Aspartate is one of three components of aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal), a sugar substitute. In higher concentrations as food additives, these chemicals constantly stimulate brain cells and can cause them to undergo a process of cell death known as excitotoxicity—the cells are excited to death.

For the moment we are witnessing the decline of the spiritual while the material long ago developed into an organism with its own bloodstream, and became the basis of our lives, paralysed and riddled with sclerosis. It is clear to everyone that material progress doesn't in itself make people happy, but all the same we go on fanatically multiplying its 'achievements'. We have reached the point where, as Stalker says, the present has essentially merged with the future, in the sense that it contains all the preconditions for immanent disaster; we recognise this and yet we can do nothing to stop it happening.

There is no specific test for multiple sclerosis.  Its early symptoms - fatigue, loss of sensation, weakness and visual changes - are frequently misdiagnosed as psychoneurosis or an even more severe psychiatric disorder, such as hysteria, particularly in women. When doctors could find no organic cause for [Jacqueline Du Pré's] complaints, they prescribed a year's rest, and referred her to a psychiatrist... When she consulted a doctor in Australia about her tenacious fatigue and occasional double vision in her right eye, he dismissed her symptoms as "adolescent trauma" and suggested she take up a relaxing hobby.

ME/CFS has a greater negative impact on functional status and well-being than other chronic diseases, e.g., cancer or lung diseases[8], and is associated with a drastic decrement in physical functioning[9]. In a comparison study[10] ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower than patients with hypertension, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and multiple sclerosis (MS), on all of the eight Short Form Health Survey (SF-36)[11] subscales. As compared to patients with depression, ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower on all the scales, except for scales measuring mental health and role disability due to emotional problems, on which they scored significantly higher.

The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness. Cancer, pernicious anemia, and diabetes are just fine, and even people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease may continue to go far in the company until they are no longer allowed to go on at all. But unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be ruined.

Endocannabinoids appear to be profoundly connected with the concept of homeostasis (maintaining physiological stability), helping redress specific imbalances presented by disease or by injury. Endocannabinoids’ role in pain signaling has led to the hypothesis that endocannabinoid levels may be responsible for the baseline of pain throughout the body, which is why cannabinoid-based medicines may be useful in treating conditions such as fibromyalgia (a condition marked by muscular pain and stiffness). This could also mean that the constant release of the body’s own endocannabinoids could have a “tonic” effect on muscle tightness (spasticity) in multiple sclerosis, neuropathic pain, inflammation, and even baseline appetite. The value of proper “endocannabinoid tone” throughout the body could be very significant to general well-being.

EBV is a virus that chronically inflames nerves. Most strains of EBV are mild and less aggressive, but its multiple sclerosis varieties eat away at the myelin sheath, which is what creates the distinct set of symptoms associated with this disease. (As for your immune system, not only is it innocent of any wrongdoing, it’s your primary defense against MS. When your immune system gets what it needs, recovery is possible—and within reach.) Something else that distinguishes MS from other forms of EBV is that it’s accompanied by a unique combination of bacteria, fungi, and heavy metals. Specifically, if you have MS, you’ll typically have the following EBV cofactors in your system: Streptococcus A and Streptococcus B bacteria H. pylori bacteria (or at least a previous case of H. pylori) Candida fungus Cytomegalovirus The heavy metals copper, mercury, and aluminum—these metals weaken the immune system’s ability to protect the body from viral nerve damage

Homologous recombination occurs naturally to create genetic diversity in our offspring and is also conveniently harnessed by scientists to introduce experimental DNA into cells or animals. We do not yet know if this occurs with the contaminating human DNA found in some of our vaccines, and if so, to what extent. Imagine the potential consequences of human DNA from a vaccine, a vaccine that is given to children at an average age of 15 months, being incorporated into a child’s developing brain. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this potential has to be studied. In addition to the potential for homologous recombination, DNA is known to be a powerful immune stimulant. Diseases like graft versus host, juvenile (type I) diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus and some forms of arthritis are what are called auto-immune diseases. These are diseases driven by immune attack from our own immune system on our own organs, a system normally responsible to attack invading bacteria and pathogens. Targeted self-destruction, if you will.

While Humans of Cannabis in a Renaissance of Hope is filled with stories of hope, it is also a reminder of the work that remains. Thousands of people remain incarcerated in the United States for cannabis-related offenses, even as legalization sweeps across the country. The fight for justice and equity is far from over. My hope is that this book inspires readers to see cannabis not as a divisive issue but as a unifying force. Whether you are passionate about medical miracles, criminal justice reform, or community healing, these stories demonstrate the profound impact of this plant.

These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. Myelin acts like rubber insulation on wires and prevents the signal from petering out: in whales, giraffes, and other stretched creatures, a sheathed neuron can send a signal multiple yards with little loss of fidelity. (In contrast, diseases that fray myelin, like multiple sclerosis, destroy communication between different nodes in the brain.) In sum, you can think about the gray matter as a patchwork of chips that analyze different types of information, and about the white matter as cables that transmit information between those chips. (And before we go further, I should point out that “gray” and “white” are misnomers. Gray matter looks pinkish-tan inside a living skull, while white matter, which makes up the bulk of the brain, looks pale pink. The white and gray colors appear only after you soak the brain in preservatives. Preservatives also harden the brain, which is normally tapioca-soft. This explains why the brain you might have dissected in biology class way back when didn’t disintegrate between your fingers.)

COULD IT BE B12 DEFICIENCY? The neurological symptoms of B12 deficiency that occur in young and middle-aged people are very similar to those in older people. They include the following: • Numbness, tingling, or burning sensations of the hands, feet, extremities, or truncal area, often misdiagnosed as diabetic neuropathy or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) • Tremor, often misdiagnosed as essential tremor or pre-Parkinson’s disease • Muscle weakness, paresthesias, and paralysis, sometimes attributed to Guillain-Barré syndrome • Pain, fatigue, and debility, often labeled as “chronic fatigue syndrome” • “Shaky leg” syndrome (leg trembling) • Confusion and mental fogginess, often misdiagnosed as early-onset dementia • Unsteadiness, dizziness, and paresthesias, often misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis • Weakness of extremities, clumsiness, muscle cramps, twitching, or foot drop, often misdiagnosed as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) • Psychiatric symptoms, such as depression or psychosis (covered in greater length in the next chapter) • Visual disturbances, vision loss, or blindness In contrast, a doctor ignorant about the effects of B12 deficiency can destroy a patient’s life. The

The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery. Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma. Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.

Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilisations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West. They too are threatened, because they have adopted another rhythm. Having lost the monopoly on stagnation, they grow increasingly frantic and will inevitably topple like their models, like those feverish civilisations incapable of lasting more than a dozen centuries. In the future, the peoples who accede to hegemony will enjoy it even less: history in slow motion has inexorably been replaced by history out of breath. Who can help regretting the pharaohs and their Chinese colleagues? Institutions, societies, civilisations differ in duration and significance, yet all are subject to one and the same law, which decrees that the invincible impulse, the factor of their rise, must sag and settle after a certain time, this decadence corresponding to a slackening of that energiser which is . . . delirium. Compared with periods of expansion, of dementia really, those of decline seem sane and are so, are too much so—which makes them almost as deadly as the others. A nation that has fulfilled itself, that has expended its talents and exploited the last resources of its genius, expiates such success by producing nothing thereafter. It has done its duty, it aspires to vegetate, but to its cost it will not have the latitude to do so. When the Romans—or what remained of them—sought repose, the Barbarians got under way, en masse. We read in a history of the invasions that the German tribes serving in the Empire’s army and administration assumed Latin names until the middle of the fifth century. After which, Germanic names became a requirement. Exhausted, in retreat on every front, the masters were no longer feared, no longer respected. What was the use of bearing their names? “A fatal somnolence reigned everywhere,” observed Salvian, bittersweet censor of the ancient deliquescence in its final stages.

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.

A number of clinical trials have shown benefits (though sometimes modest) of dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids in several inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, and migraine headaches. In fact, in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, supplementation with fish oil led to substantial improvements in joint swelling, pain, and morning stiffness and enabled them to reduce their use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Supplementation is beneficial because it helps correct the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid intake. The Paleo Approach goes one very important step further because it focuses not only on increasing omega-3 fatty acids (from whole-food sources such as fish, shellfish, and pasture-raised meats) but also on decreasing omega-6 fatty acids (by avoiding processed vegetable oils, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds). Achieving the proper ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids will contribute substantially to the management of autoimmune disease and to overall health.

In Super Genes, Chopra and Tanzi acquaint us with new research that shows that “Some microbiomes may work better at nutrient extraction than others, with obese people extracting too much and skinny people extracting too little.” They also tell us that the microbiome reaches beyond digestion into every part of the body, and “It’s now known that gut bacteria produce neuroactive compounds that interact with brain cells and which can even control the expression of our own genes through epigenetics. When the natural balance of the microbiome becomes disrupted and unbalanced, we call it dysbiosis, yet only now is it being discovered that far from being just a digestive problem, dysbiosis is systemic in the damage it causes. The range of disorders linked to it is growing but is already startling in its numbers: links have been found to asthma, eczema, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, obesity, cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, cancer, and malnutrition. Avenues for new treatments are leading down the same road—to the microbiome.

The severe exacerbation of symptoms following exercise, as seen in CFS patients, is not present in other disorders where fatigue is a predominant symptom such as depression, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, or multiple sclerosis. 10,11

The Senate was the home of governmental sclerosis.

All my memories of my father include some manifestation of his disability, even if none of us were quite willing to call it that yet. What I knew at the time was that my dad moved a bit more slowly than other dads. I sometimes saw him pausing before walking up a flight of stairs, as if needing to think through the maneuver before actually attempting it.

Autoimmune illnesses, which include well-known ailments like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, hypothyroidism, and type 1 diabetes, occur when our immune system mistakenly mounts an attack against our own bodily tissues.

British historian Tony Judt died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2010. In an extraordinary interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Judt explained that with a severe condition like ALS, in which you’re surrounded by equipment and health professionals, the danger isn’t that you’ll lash out and be mean. But, rather, it’s that you’ll disconnect from those you love. “It’s that they lose a sense of your presence,” he says, “that you stop being omnipresent in their lives.” And so, he said, his responsibility to his family and friends was not to be unfailingly positive and “Pollyanna,” which wouldn’t be honest. “It’s to be as present in their lives now as I can be so that in years to come they don’t feel either guilty or bad at my having been left out of their lives, that they feel still a very strong … memory of a complete family rather than a broken one.” Asked

Most of the trip was a blur, but on the last day, I sat down for breakfast with several of the roommates, including Jeff King, who had been diagnosed years earlier with multiple sclerosis. Dave and I had discussed Jeff’s illness many times with each other, but that morning I realized that I had never actually spoken with Jeff about it. Hello, Elephant. “Jeff,” I said, “how are you? I mean, really, how are you? How are you feeling? Are you scared?” Jeff looked up in surprise and paused for a long few moments. With tears in his eyes, he said, “Thank you. Thank you for asking.” And then he talked. He talked about his diagnosis and how he hated that he had to stop practicing medicine. How his continued deterioration was hard on his children. How he was worried about his future. How relieved he felt being able to talk about it with me and the others at the table that morning. When breakfast was over, he hugged me tight. In

Particular variants in our pathogen-recognition genes, which protected us from ancient epidemics, correlate with a range of autoimmune disorders, from diabetes and multiple sclerosis to lupus.27

The finding that ME and CFS group had more functional limitations and more serious symptoms than those with MS [multiple sclerosis] provides additional evidence to the seriousness of ME and CFS.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive, highly morbid, debilitating neurological disease that attacks the neurons responsible for controlling voluntary muscles. The disease is one of a group of motor neuron diseases in which the etiology is characterized by

Maybe democracies, maybe all cultures, had life cycles, the same as the humans who comprised them. And maybe there were things cultures could do to extend their lives—the equivalent of exercise and eating right, or, to analogize to what Horton had done, the equivalent of radical surgery—but those things would, in the end, matter only at the margins. Maybe, regardless of the efforts of the exceptional few, the genes hidden and inherent in a culture’s own DNA would dictate a length of years, and make inevitable the onset of sclerosis, and senility, and death, as ineluctably as the Fates cutting the thread of an individual life.

From my experience of ME/CFS there was no psychological component whatsoever, besides which exercise, if anything, was making me worse not better. I was not deconditioned or frightened to exercise. The symptoms were more consistent with a brain tumour or multiple sclerosis. The reality is ME/CFS is a serious, heritable, neurological condition and I was shocked to discover subsequently that my grandmother had died from it aged 42.

People who are that big must have a disease, just like the patients with pancreatic cancer or multiple sclerosis.

As I sit on the folding metal chair I begin to fear getting up. As the finale approaches, I experience outright panic. What if my feet no longer move? What if my muscles lock? What if this neuritis or neuropathy or neurological inflammation has evolved into a condition more malign? I once in my late twenties had an exclusionary diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, believe later by the neurologist who made the diagnosis to be in remission, but what if it is no longer in remission? What if it never was? What if it has returned? What if I stand up from this folding chair in this rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street and collapse, fall to the floor, the folding metal chair collapsing with me? Or what if--- (Another series of dire possibilities occurs to me, this series even more alarming than the last---) What if the damage extends beyond the physical? What if the problem is now cognitive? What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point---the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated---what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own? What if my new inability to summon the right word, the apt thought, the connection that enables the words to make sense, the rhythm, the music itself--- What if this new inability is systemic? What if I can never again locate the words that work?

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It's three long words, and I can say it faster than anyone in the family, like a ninja-twister champ. I didn't mean to get so good at it, but it goes through my head over and over like a soccer move I can't shake. It's a super-frustrating disease to fight. One day a muscle moves - the next day? Nope.

The Feeling Being

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by lymphatic vessels we didn’t know existed.25 That we had no idea about these vessels given the fact that the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly studied and charted throughout the body is astonishing on its own. And such a discovery will have significant effects on the study and treatment of neurological diseases, from autism and multiple sclerosis to Alzheimer’s disease and, yes, depression. It’s

WAHLS WARRIORS SPEAK In August 2012, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The symptoms came on suddenly: tingling and numbness in my right arm and right and left hands, bladder urgency, cognitive issues and brain fog, lower back pain, and right-foot drop. One Saturday, I was playing golf, and by the next Friday, I was using a cane to walk. I was scared and I did not know what was happening. I was started on a five-day treatment of IV steroids. I began physical and occupational therapy, and speech therapy to assist with my word-finding issues. Desperate, I searched the Internet and read as much as I could about multiple sclerosis. I tried to discuss diet with my neurologist because I read that people with autoimmune diseases may benefit from going gluten-free. My neurologist recommended that I stick with my “balanced” diet because gluten-free may be a fad and it was difficult to do. In October 2012, I went to a holistic practitioner who recommended that I eliminate gluten, dairy, and eggs from my diet and then take an allergy test. About that time, I discovered Dr. Wahls, whose story provided me hope. I began to incorporate the 9 cups of produce and to eat organic lean meat, lots of wild fish, seaweed, and some organ meat (though I still struggle with that). My allergy tests came back and, sure enough, I was highly sensitive to gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, and almonds. This test further validated Dr. Wahls’s work. By eliminating highly inflammatory foods and replacing them with vegetables, lean meat, and seaweed, your body can heal. It’s been four months since I started the Wahls Diet, and I’ve increased my vitamin D levels from 17 to 52, my medicine has been reduced, and I have lost 14 pounds. I now exercise and run two miles several times per week, walk three miles a day, bike, swim, strength train, meditate, and stretch daily. I prepare smoothies and real meals in my kitchen. Gone are the days of eating out or ordering takeout three to four times a week. By eating this way, my energy levels have increased, my brain fog and stumbling over words has been eliminated, my skin looks great, and I am more alert and present. It is not easy eating this way, and my family has also had to make some adjustments, but, in the end, I choose health. I am more in tune with my body and I feed it the fuel it needs to thrive. —Michelle M., Baltimore, Maryland

if you already have genes predisposed to an autoimmune disease, and you eat grains and legumes, you’re putting your hand on a trigger, and it’s only a matter of time before you pull it and allow the damaged genes to rule.

When the researchers performed brain scans on these patients, they found noticeable changes in the white matter that could easily be confused with multiple sclerosis or even small strokes. This is the reason I always check for gluten sensitivity in patients referred to me with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis; on many occasions I’ve found patients whose brain changes were in fact not related to multiple sclerosis at all and were likely due to gluten sensitivity. And lucky for them, a gluten-free diet reversed their condition.

The danger of alienation from the unconscious presents itself in two forms: sclerosis of consciousness, and possession.

What did she pass from?” the girl asked. “M.S. Multiple sclerosis.” “What’s that?” “It’s a human disease where the body’s immune system attacks the coating that protects your nerve fibers? Without that sheath, you can’t tell your body what to do, so you lose the ability to walk, feed yourself, speak. Or at least, my mom did. Some people with it have long periods of remission when the disease isn’t active. She wasn’t one of them.” Mary rubbed the center of her chest. “There are more options for treatment now than there were fifteen or twenty years ago when she was first diagnosed. Maybe she would have lasted longer in this era of medicine. Who knows.

A Healthy Immune system equals A Healthy body

Our wedding took place on a blustery midwinter day. The fifteenth of January 2000. Yet the sun shone through the clouds brightly. Shara’s father, Brian, who so sadly was suffering with multiple sclerosis, gave her away from his wheelchair in the church. Brian cried. Shara cried. Everyone cried. We left the church to our friends singing a cappella versions of “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees” and “I’m a Believer.” I was the happiest I had ever been. Right decisions make you feel like that. We then danced to a Peruvian street band that Trucker had come across, and ate bangers and mash at long tables. The day was above all, love-filled. We were both among the first, and youngest, of our group of friends to be married, which made it feel even more special. (A wedding was novel for all of us in those days.) And Charlie and Trucker made everyone cry some more with their best-men speeches.

You know how the minute you get a disease, especially if it's a really juicy one, the kind with excellent potential to develop, I mean, to degenerate, then every person you run into tries to prove to you how it's actually not that bad? On the contrary! They all know someone who heard about someone who's been living with MS or liver cancer for twenty years, and their lives are awesome! Never been better. And they make such a big deal convincing you how awesome and cool and super-duper it is that you start thinking you must have been an idiot not to get you some of that sclerosis ages ago! You could have had such a fabulous life together!

fully fifty-five diseases are known to be caused by gluten (Farrell and Kelly 2002). Among these are heart disease, cancer, nearly all autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, irritable bowel syndrome and other gastrointestinal disorders, gallbladder disease, Hashimoto’s disease (an autoimmune thyroid disorder responsible for up to 90 percent of all low-functioning thyroid issues), migraines, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), neuropathies (having normal EMG readings), and most other degenerative neurological disorders as well as autism, which is technically an autoimmune brain disorder.

Cannabinoids can exacerbate schizophrenic psychosis in predisposed persons.

Meanwhile, rules meant to stop opioids leaking to the black market have left the innocent to die in avoidable pain. Multiple-sclerosis sufferers and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy have been denied the relief that cannabis can bring.

Just as the discoveries of medication and surgery led to therapies to relieve a staggering number of conditions, so does the discovery of neuroplasticity. The reader will find cases, many very detailed, that may be relevant to someone who has, or cares for someone who has experienced, chronic pain, stroke, traumatic brain injury, brain damage, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, attention deficit disorder, a learning disorder (including dyslexia), a sensory processing disorder, a developmental delay, a part of the brain missing, Down syndrome, or certain kinds of blindness, among others.

• While a female flight attendant was serving food from the meal cart, a female passenger thrust a small bundle of trash toward her. “Take this,” the passenger demanded. Realizing that the trash was actually a used baby diaper, the attendant instructed the passenger to take it to the lavatory herself and dispose of it. “No,” the passenger replied. “You take it!” The attendant explained that she couldn’t dispose of the dirty diaper because she was serving food—handling the diaper would be unsanitary. But that wasn’t a good enough answer for the passenger. Angered by her refusal, the passenger hurled the diaper at the flight attendant. It struck her square in the head, depositing chunks of baby dung that clung like peanut butter to her hair. The two women ended up wrestling on the floor. They had to be separated by passengers. • Passengers on a flight from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, were stunned by the actions of one deranged passenger. He walked to the rear of the plane, then charged up the aisle, slapping passengers’ heads along the way. Next, he kicked a pregnant flight attendant, who immediately fell to the ground. As if that weren’t enough, he bit a young boy on the arm. At this point the man was restrained and handcuffed by crew members. He was arrested upon arrival. • When bad weather closed the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for several hours, departing planes were stuck on the ground for the duration. One frustrated passenger, a young woman, walked up to a female flight attendant and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.” The passenger then punched the flight attendant in the face, breaking her nose in the process. • A flight attendant returning to work after a double-mastectomy and a struggle with multiple sclerosis had a run-in with a disgruntled passenger. One of the last to board the plane, the passenger became enraged when there was no room in the overhead bin above his seat. He snatched the bags from the compartment, threw them to the floor and put his own bag in the space he had created. After hearing angry cries from passengers, the flight attendant appeared from the galley to see what the fuss was all about. When the passengers explained what happened, she turned to the offending passenger. “Sir, you can’t do that,” she said. The passenger stood up, cocked his arm and broke her jaw with one punch. • For some inexplicable reason, a passenger began throwing peanuts at a man across the aisle. The man was sitting with his wife, minding his own business. When the first peanut hit him in the face, he ignored it. After the second peanut struck him, he looked up to see who had thrown it. He threw a harsh glance at the perpetrator, expecting him to cease immediately. When a third peanut hit him in the eye, he’d had enough. “Do that again,” he warned, “and I’ll punch your lights out.” But the peanut-tossing passenger couldn’t resist. He tossed a salted Planter’s one last time. The victim got out of his seat and triple-punched the peanut-tosser so hard that witnesses heard his jaw break. The plane was diverted to the closest airport and the peanut-tosser was kicked off. • During a full flight between New York and London, a passenger noticed that the sleeping man in the window seat looked a bit pale. Sensing that something was wrong yet not wanting to wake him, the concerned passenger alerted flight attendants who soon determined that the sleeping man was dead. Apparently, he had died a few hours earlier because his body was already cold. Horrified by the prospect of sitting next to a dead man, the passenger demanded another seat. But the flight was completely full; every seat was occupied. Finally, one flight attendant had an inspiration. She approached a uniformed military officer who agreed to sit next to the dead man for the duration of the flight.

Estriol—Estriol is the weakest of the three estrogens and has a protective role in breast tissue. It is believed to protect vaginal tissue too. Estriol helps to reduce hot flashes in women, protects the urinary tract, and plays a role in retention of bone density. It can help increase “good” HDL and decrease “bad” LDL cholesterol. One compelling study showed that taking estriol can reverse brain lesions in women with multiple sclerosis. Estrogen is particularly needed in women to make serotonin function at its best in the brain. Serotonin is one of the brain’s feel-good hormones. With no estrogen, your mood can change to anxious and depressed. Cognitive functions, such as critical thinking and short-term memory, are also eroded with the loss of estrogen production. Below is a list of symptoms related to low and high estrogen levels:

Herpesvirus. Herpes is actually a very large family of viruses, several of which are strongly linked to autoimmune disease. For example, Guillain-Barré syndrome and systemic lupus erythematosus are associated with infections from viruses in the Cytomegalovirus genus. Although most people infected are completely asymptomatic, some experience symptoms similar to mononucleosis (sore throat, swollen glands, prolonged fever, and mild hepatitis). However, cytomegaloviral infections remain latent in the body and may cause serious disease should you become immunocompromised later in life. An estimated 40 percent of adults worldwide have had cytomegaloviral infections. Epstein-Barr virus is a member of the Herpesvirus family. It is responsible for infectious mononucleosis (mono or glandular fever). Infection with Epstein-Barr is associated with a higher risk of dermatomyositis, systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome, and multiple sclerosis. Human herpesvirus 6 is another type of Herpesvirus, with infections typically presenting as a combination of rash and fever. (The childhood disease roseola is an example.) A strong link between Human herpesvirus 6 and multiple sclerosis has been observed, and there is an increased risk of chronic fatigue syndrome associated with Human herpesvirus 6 infection.

Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii). This parasite, which is present in birds and cats, is the reason pregnant women are not supposed to scoop kitty litter. At least 40 percent and as much as 70 percent of humans in Western countries are infected with toxoplasmosis, which is completely asymptomatic unless you are immunocompromised or become infected while pregnant. (There is no risk to the fetus if you are infected with Toxoplasma gondii before becoming pregnant, but getting infected during gestation can cause a variety of serious health problems for the baby.) This parasite, while typically considered completely benign, is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (a suspected autoimmune disease), Parkinson’s disease (a suspected autoimmune disease), Tourette syndrome, antiphospholipid syndrome, systemic sclerosis, and inflammatory bowel diseases.

One more item I’d like to point out from this study: When the researchers performed brain scans on these patients, they found noticeable changes in the white matter that could easily be confused with multiple sclerosis or even small strokes. This is the reason I always check for gluten sensitivity in patients referred to me with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis; on many occasions I’ve found patients whose brain changes were in fact not related to multiple sclerosis at all and were likely due to gluten sensitivity. And lucky for them, a gluten-free diet reversed their condition.

Multiple sclerosis. I knew from the first moment I felt the tremble in my hand that it was coming.  But not anymore. I’ve done all of the things I set out to do.  The company has a new leader waiting in the wings.  I’ve tied up all the loose ends.  I’ve made peace with my life in all the ways that I can.  My affairs are in order. I’ve written two of the most difficult letters I’ve ever had to write.  One to Jessie because I couldn’t leave her without trying to

Wellness is the complete integration of body, mind, and spirit – the realization that everything we do, think, feel, and believe has an effect on our state of well-being.” – Greg Anderson

At least Japan had sufficient domestic savings to fund its escalating national debt and printed its own currency. Europe’s stricken periphery wasn’t so fortunate. Take Draghi’s homeland. In the fifteen years since the start of the euro project, Italy enjoyed no increase in income per capita and labour costs climbed relative to Germany’s, rendering Italian exports uncompetitive. Italy’s public debt trailed only Japan’s and Greece’s. Italian banks were loaded down with hundreds of billions of euros of bad debts. Many of its largest businesses were certified zombies. Political sclerosis accompanied the economic version. The IMF warned that ‘in the absence of deeper structural reforms, medium-term growth is projected to remain low.’30 Without adequate economic growth, Italy’s sovereign debt problems and the Eurozone’s existential crisis remained unresolved. As in Japan, easy money bought time, but time was wasted.fn6

Paradoxical as it may seem, the riches of nations can be measured by the violence of the crises which they experience,’ opined the nineteenth-century French economist Clément Juglar.13 Once creative destruction is taken into account, Juglar’s observation doesn’t appear so puzzling. Some economists take a ‘pit-stop’ view of recessions, seeing them as periods when efficiency measures are most likely to be undertaken.14 Business failures, which soar during economic downturns, are seen as essential to the economy’s evolution over time. As the saying attributed to the former astronaut and airline boss Frank Borman goes, ‘capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.’ If that is the case, then monetary policy should not interrupt a recession’s cleansing effect.fn4 Put another way, if financial stability is destabilizing (as Hyman Minsky maintained), too much economic stability induces sclerosis.

statistics most people aren’t familiar with, women are: Twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or depression. Twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Three times more likely to develop an autoimmune disorder, including those that attack the brain, such as multiple sclerosis. Four times more likely to suffer from headaches and migraines. More likely to develop brain tumors such as meningiomas. More likely to be killed by a stroke.

Multiple Sclerosis is known to increase by ten times in populations nearer to the poles as compared to the equator!

Small numbers of senescent cells can cause widespread havoc. Even though they stop dividing, they continue to release tiny proteins called cytokines that cause inflammation and attract immune cells called macrophages that then attack the tissue. Being chronically inflamed is unhealthy: just ask someone with multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, or psoriasis. All these diseases are associated with excess cytokine proteins.

My name is Bill Brandon i live in south Carolina, I am here to testify to the good work of the Best African Traditional Doctor As he Call himself 4 years ago, my lovely husband left home, he never returned, no phone calls,no letters, no emails, no sign of him anywhere. my daughter got so sick with multiple sclerosis that made her paralyses, things were so tough for me. I had lost hope, i met UTHMAN MAJANGWA on the internet,he said would help me at-least saving my daughter's life and getting a job that i was contesting for,i had lost hope completely, my daughter's situation got worse each day. I decided to try UTHMAN MAJANGWA i gave him a try...for all three spells (Bring Lover back, Healing spell and Career spells). In a matter of weeks, my husband called me and told me apologizing that he was sorry and that he wants to come back to me and that he would explain everything when he reaches home three days later, i got my new job with a loan from a finance company,right now my daughters condition is getting better each day and i trust she would be well day by day. I want to thank UTHMAN MAJANGWA for being so kind and for his effort and for bringing my life back that i can now have smiles on my face with my family back together. When i talk about this man i don't want to finish he is my life hero of the century thanks DR UTHMAN MAJANGWA Email:drwilliamokoro18@gmail.com powerfulspe

Shortly afterward, Cook faced another unexpected personal challenge: he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease threatened to disable his brain and impair his spinal cord. He later learned that it had been a misdiagnosis, but the health scare inspired him to raise money for MS research and contributed to a period of introspection. Around that time, he found himself asking: What is my life’s purpose? “It began to dawn on me then that the purpose of life wasn’t to love your job,” he told a group of Oxford students two decades later. “It was to serve humanity in some broad way, and the outcome of doing that would mean that you would love your job. I began to realize I wasn’t in a place to do that.

Samantha Markle, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair, described her half sister as a “shallow social climber” whose behavior was “certainly not befitting of a royal family member.” She went on to say that “being a princess was something Meghan always dreamed of as a little girl. She always preferred Harry—she has a soft spot for gingers.” Samantha also accused Meghan of failing to come to the aid of their cash-strapped dad. The Windsors, she went on, would be “appalled by what she’s done to her own family.” Soon

Un pomeriggio mi chiedesti di uscire, te lo ricordi, no? Eravamo fermi ai piedi delle scale davanti alla scuola, subito dopo l’ennesimo allenamento. Gli altri si erano già allontanati e io, lenta come sempre, ero fra le ultime a lasciare l’istituto. Perciò, rimasi confusa di vederti lì ad aspettarmi, con lo zaino su una spalla e le mani nelle tasche del pantalone scuro di tuta.

Among parents who lost an adult son to an accident or military conflict, the authors reported increased occurrence of lymphatic and hematological malignancy—cancers of the blood, bone marrow, and lymph nodes—along with skin and lung cancer.8 War kills, and so, it seems, can deep emotional loss. As for cancer, so with other illnesses. In a Danish nationwide study, grieving parents had double the risk of multiple sclerosis.9

Researchers believe poppers to be the direct cause of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer that afflicts the nose, throat, lungs, and skin.77 Kaposi’s sarcoma was the initial indicator disease of AIDS, but it was also common in gay men who were not infected with HIV. Poppers can severely damage the immune system, genes, lungs, liver, heart, or the brain; they can produce neural damage similar to that of multiple sclerosis, can have carcinogenic effects, and can lead to “sudden sniffing death.

Autophagy is essential to life. If it shuts down completely, the organism dies. Imagine if you stopped taking out the garbage (or the recycling); your house would soon become uninhabitable. Except instead of trash bags, this cellular cleanup is carried out by specialized organelles called lysosomes, which package up the old proteins and other detritus, including pathogens, and grind them down (via enzymes) for reuse. In addition, the lysosomes also break up and destroy things called aggregates, which are clumps of damaged proteins that accumulate over time. Protein aggregates have been implicated in diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, so getting rid of them is good; impaired autophagy has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease–related pathology and also to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.

A sign of democratic sclerosis is a loss of confidence in the integrity of voting—to the point that it becomes seen as a futile exercise rather than a bulwark of citizenship.

One of my friends that works in electromagnetic field remediation found a home with a broken neutral on the electrical panel. The occupant had become mysteriously sickly in the home with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) symptoms! Testing showed the home was filled with high levels of magnetic fields.

Supplements for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Fresh celery juice: work up to 32 ounces daily, then work up to 64 ounces if possible Celeryforce: 2 capsules three times a day 5-MTHF: 2 capsules twice a day ALA (alpha lipoic acid): 1 capsule daily Barley grass juice powder: 2 to 4 teaspoons

An effective contradiction exists only where the relation between the positive and the negative is not one of alternation, but where the negation of the negation is capable of exercising its function against itself as an abstract or immediate negation and so founding contradiction while founding its transcendence. The Hegelian notion of the negation of the negation is not a solution of despair, nor is it a verbal artifice to escape from embarrassment. It is the formula of every operative contradiction and by leaving it aside one abandons dialectical thought itself, which is the fecundity of contradiction. The notion of a labor of the negative, as a negation which neither exhausts itself in the exclusion of the positive nor, when confronted with it, exhausts itself in conjuring up a term which annuls it, but instead reconstructs the positive beyond its limitations, destroying it and preserving it, is not a gradual perfecting or sclerosis of dialectical thought: it is its primordial resort (moreover, it is not astonishing to find it intimated in Plato where he calls the "same" the "other than the other"). We have related the notion of negation to the modern notion of transcendence, that is to say, to a being which is in principle at a distance, in regard to which distance is a bond but with which there can be no question of coïncidence. Here, as in the other case, the relation of self to self passes through the external, the immediate demands mediation, or, again, mediation exists through the self.

​The antidote to fear is faith.

A Whacky Dream Or Not? When my neurologist told me that my MS would eventually be fatal for me, I was depressed and angry. The reason for being depressed is obvious. But the anger? I was mad at God! How could He let this happen to me! I had been working on a devotional book about living with a disease. But when I received the latest diagnosis from her, I shelved the book and didn't write again for a year and a half. And then, I had a dream about my funeral. In that dream, I could see my body in a casket. Then the "dream minister" began his homily. He mentioned how "God gave Beth her first book on MS in a series of dreams. That book became the top book on multiple sclerosis for six years at Amazon. But the book for which she is best remembered is her devotional about disease." When I woke up, I remembered the dream. It was then that I realized that the dream minister was talking about this book! So, I started writing again. Maybe it was just some whacky dream! But my dear friend Jim didn't think so. He once said to me, "If I am ever flying on a plane sometime, and you have a dream that my plane crashed, guess what? I would cancel the flight!" Jim unfortunately died before the devotional book about disease was published, but I do believe that he knows. So now my 5th book, "So You Have a Disease: Devotions and Stories To Restore Hope", has been published by CrossLink Publishing and is available. But mainly I am so grateful to God for giving me the motivation to finish writing the book. It probably wouldn't have happened otherwise if He hadn't given me that dream. Multiple Sclerosis has robbed me of absolutely everything. I have gone from doing daily kick boxing to now being in a wheelchair. But if this book helps other people who are suffering from a serious disease, then my life will have had some purpose and I am so grateful for this opportunity to speak to other individuals who are also suffering. So was the dream about my funeral a whacky dream or not? Only time will tell.

Motivation To Write My Book, "So You Have a Disease: Devotions and Stories To Restore Hope" When my neurologist told me that my MS would eventually be fatal for me, I was depressed and angry. The reason for being depressed is obvious. But the anger? I was mad at God! How could He let this happen to me! I had been working on a devotional book about living with a disease. But when I received the latest diagnosis from her, I shelved the book and didn't write again for a year and a half. And then, I had a dream about my funeral. In that dream, I could see my body in a casket. Then the "dream minister" began his homily. He mentioned how "God gave Beth her first book on MS in a series of dreams. That book became the top book on multiple sclerosis for six years at Amazon. But the book for which she is best remembered is her devotional about disease." When I woke up, I remembered the dream. It was then that I realized that the dream minister was talking about this book! So, I started writing again. Maybe it was just some wacky dream! But my dear friend Jim didn't think so. He once said to me, "If I am ever flying on a plane sometime, and you have a dream that my plane crashed, guess what? I would cancel the flight!" Jim unfortunately died before the devotional book about disease was published, but I do believe that he knows. So now my 5th book, "So You Have a Disease: Devotions and Stories To Restore Hope", has been published by CrossLink Publishing and is available. But mainly I am so grateful to God for giving me the motivation to finish writing the book. It probably wouldn't have happened otherwise if He hadn't given me that dream. Multiple Sclerosis has robbed me of absolutely everything. I have gone from doing daily kick boxing to now being in a wheelchair. But if this book helps other people who are suffering from a serious disease, then my life will have had some purpose and I am so grateful for this opportunity to speak to other individuals who are also suffering.

What Motivated Me To Write My 5th Book, "So You Have a Disease: Devotions and Stories To Restore Hope" by Beth Praed When my neurologist told me that my MS would eventually be fatal for me, I was depressed and angry. The reason for being depressed is obvious. But the anger? I was mad at God! How could He let this happen to me! I had been working on a devotional book about living with a disease. But when I received the latest diagnosis from her, I shelved the book and didn't write again for a year and a half. And then, I had a dream about my funeral. In that dream, I could see my body in a casket. Then the "dream minister" began his homily. He mentioned how "God gave Beth her first book on MS in a series of dreams. That book became the top book on multiple sclerosis for six years at Amazon. But the book for which she is best remembered is her devotional about disease." When I woke up, I remembered the dream. It was then that I realized that the dream minister was talking about this book! So, I started writing again. Maybe it was just some wacky dream! But my dear friend Jim didn't think so. He once said to me, "If I am ever flying on a plane sometime, and you have a dream that my plane crashed, guess what? I would cancel the flight!" Jim unfortunately died before the devotional book about disease was published, but I do believe that he knows. So now my 5th book, "So You Have a Disease: Devotions and Stories To Restore Hope", has been published by CrossLink Publishing and is available. But mainly I am so grateful to God for giving me the motivation to finish writing the book. It probably wouldn't have happened otherwise if He hadn't given me that dream. Multiple Sclerosis has robbed me of absolutely everything. I have gone from doing daily kick boxing to now being in a wheelchair. But if this book helps other people who are suffering from a serious disease, then my life will have had some purpose and I am so grateful for this opportunity to speak to other individuals who are also suffering.