Sooner or later in a first consultation, someone with multiple sclerosis asks me the real question.
Sometimes directly, more often sideways — through a story about somebody’s cousin who supposedly recovered, or a video they watched at two in the morning. What they are asking is whether I can make this go away.
I have been in practice for nearly 30 years, and I have never once said yes to that question. I want to explain why, and then explain what I do say, because the second part is where the useful conversation actually starts.
The Question I Ask First
Before any examination, I want the whole timeline. Not the last six months — the decades.
Illnesses, injuries, surgeries, the years that took something out of you, the environments you lived and worked in, and the point at which sleep or energy first changed. It usually takes a while, and people frequently go quiet partway through, because it is the first time anyone has asked them to lay their own life out in sequence.
I want that picture because I am not treating a diagnosis, I am working with a person whose system arrived here by a particular route. Two people with the same MRI findings can be in very different functional positions, and the route explains a fair amount of that difference.
What I am not doing with that history is telling anyone their MS was caused by their stresses. I have seen too much to be casual about causation, and the honest position is that we do not fully know why MS starts in a given person. The history tells me about capacity, not about cause.
Why I Look at Function Rather Than Lesions
Your MRI shows structure. It shows where demyelination has occurred, and it is the right tool for that job.
What it does not show is how well signal is moving through the rest of the system on any given day. There are 88 major nerves branching off the brain and spinal cord, and I assess function across all of them, region by region. It is closer to walking a breaker box than to asking whether the building has power.
That examination often turns up areas running below capacity that have nothing to do with any known lesion. Old injuries, long-standing compensations, regions that quietly stopped pulling their weight years ago. None of that is MS. All of it is load that a person with MS is carrying on top of MS — and unlike the disease itself, a good deal of it is workable.
Where I Stop
Now the part I would rather say too early than too late.
I do not treat MS. I do not reverse it, and I will not imply that I might. The demyelination that has occurred is real, and I am not in a position to undo it. If you have read something of mine that suggested otherwise, I would want to correct it.
I also will not advise anyone about disease-modifying therapy, beyond one thing I feel strongly enough to say plainly: stay on it and keep your neurology appointments. Those medications reduce relapses and slow the accumulation of disability, and disability that accrues does not come back. I have watched people lose function during a gap in treatment, and there is nothing I or anyone else can do afterwards to return it. Whatever else you take from anything I have said, take that.
And I do not diagnose. If you have neurological symptoms and no diagnosis, a neurologist is the right first stop, not me. Early diagnosis and early treatment are the strongest predictors of how the next twenty years go. Anyone in an alternative practice who encourages you to explore with them before you have been properly assessed is costing you something you cannot buy back.
So Why Do I See MS Patients at All?
Because there is a great deal of daily life that neurology is not resourced to work on, and that is where I am useful.
The fatigue is the clearest example. It is consistently rated among the most disabling parts of MS, and it gets the least attention in an appointment that has to prioritise relapse activity and imaging. It responds — to activity within capacity, to protected sleep, to honest pacing, to managing heat deliberately. None of that alters the disease. All of it alters the day.
Then there is the nervous system state. Living with something unpredictable keeps people locked toward the protective side of the autonomic system, which degrades sleep, digestion and recovery capacity, all of which feed straight back into fatigue. That is not the disease. It is a layer sitting on top of it, and layers can be moved.
The way I put it to patients is this: I am not working on your MS. I am working on everything else you are carrying, so that your MS is the only thing you have to carry.
The Foundations I Push Hardest
Oxygen, water and light — what I call the OWL foundations — sit under everything else, and with MS I push them harder than with almost any other group.
Sleep is the one I will not compromise on. Sleep disruption is common in MS and independently makes fatigue worse, so protecting it is not a lifestyle suggestion, it is the highest-yield intervention most people have available. Morning daylight anchors it. Evening light undoes it.
Breathing is next, because it is free and immediate. A longer exhale than inhale moves the system toward its repair setting within minutes, and most people carrying a chronic condition are breathing far more shallowly than they realise.
And heat. Once someone understands that warmth temporarily slows conduction through damaged fibres — rather than causing new damage — cooling stops feeling like avoidance and starts working like a tool. Cool the room before activity, not after.
What Changed With Portability
Every tissue carries its own resonant frequency, and tissue that has drifted under sustained load performs below what it could. Frequency work aims at bringing it back into tune.
For most of my career that meant clinic equipment, which meant progress paused between visits. That was always the weak point, and for someone with fatigue as their main problem it was a serious one — travelling to appointments costs energy that person does not have to spare.
It is why I built BodyChargers. Not everyone can reach Lafayette, financially or geographically, and the people who most need consistency are often the ones for whom travel is hardest. The daily work was always going to matter more than anything I do in a treatment room.
What I Tell People on a First Visit
Bring your neurologist into this. I would rather you tell them exactly what you are doing with me than keep the two separate, and if they have concerns about anything, those concerns win.
Expect a plan rather than a session, and expect the pace to be set by your current capacity rather than by ambition. People with MS commonly react badly to intensive protocols, and the reason is simple — a system with less reserve reads heavy input as demand rather than help.
And expect most of the work to be yours. The patients who do best are the ones who learn enough that they need me less. I say that on day one, and I mean it as the goal rather than as modesty.
Where I Would Start
If you are living with MS and this way of thinking makes sense to you, the first steps are unglamorous.
Keep one line a day — fatigue in the morning and again late afternoon, sleep, heat exposure, what you did and what it cost you the following day. Within two months you will know your own pacing threshold, which is the level of activity you can sustain without a payback day. That number is personal, it moves over time, and knowing it is worth more than most things I could sell you.
Then protect sleep, get daylight early, and manage heat deliberately.
When you want to go further, BodyChargers covers the at-home methods, and the Nerve Health Institute in Lafayette is where the full functional assessment and clinic technologies are.
What I want you to leave with is not that your diagnosis is negotiable. It is that between what the disease takes and what you have been living with, there is more in the second category than most people have been shown.
This article is educational and is not medical advice. It does not diagnose or treat any condition. Multiple sclerosis requires management by a neurologist. Always consult your neurologist before making changes to your treatment or starting a new exercise programme.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a holistic approach to multiple sclerosis replace my neurologist?
No, and I would not work with anyone who wanted it to. Neurology handles diagnosis, monitoring and disease-modifying therapy, and those determine long-term outcomes. What I work on is functional capacity and the daily foundations. The people who do best hold both.
Do you think MS is caused by stress?
No. I take a detailed stress history because it tells me about a person’s current capacity and what their system has been carrying, not because I think it explains why their MS began. We do not fully know why MS starts in a given individual, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make a tidier story.
Have you seen people improve?
I have seen a lot of people function better — more usable energy, better sleep, a clearer sense of their own limits, more of the things they wanted to be able to do. What I have not seen is MS go away, and I would not tell you otherwise. Those are different claims and the difference matters.
I have symptoms but no diagnosis. Should I come to you first?
No. See a neurologist. If it is MS, early treatment is the single biggest factor in how the coming decades go, and time spent exploring alternatives beforehand is time you cannot get back. Come and see me afterwards if you want to.
Why do you talk so much about sleep?
Because sleep disruption is common in MS, it independently worsens fatigue, and fatigue is what most people tell me is ruining their week. It is also free. If I could only change one thing for a patient with MS, it would be their sleep, not anything I do in the clinic.
What if I cannot travel to Louisiana?
Then start with the at-home work, which is most of it anyway. Travel costs energy that someone with MS does not have spare, and I built BodyChargers precisely because the consistency matters more than the visit does.
Want to Go Deeper?
Start with the at-home methods, or book a full assessment at the clinic.
Explore BodyChargers → bodycharger.com
Visit the Clinic → nervehealth.com/get-treatment/
