DrTerryWahls

It's my pleasure!

1) Yes, absolutely. It is critical that you do not stop your drugs until you have dramatic improvement and with the approval of your physician(s).

2) I think the China Study is flawed. From my point of view, he appears to have been selective in the data he used and chose to ignore.

3) I continue to improve (despite my aging--coming up on 59 in November!) today. Just last week, I spent twenty minutes on the treadmill alternating between walking and jogging. The last time I actually ran was in 2000--in 2007, when I began the interventions, I could walk only short distances using two canes. I could not sit up in a regular chair for more than ten minutes. I'm feeling great. :-)

4) A lot of soy and tofu products contain estrogen and anti-nutrients. If they are a part of your diet, they should be organic and fermented, and hopefully in small amounts.

All the best!

Doesnt that seem like.. not enough people ?

It's a pilot study and you can only enroll what the institutional review board approves, which was ten people. It is not meant to be a representative sample. You start with small pilot studies and work your way up, which is exactly what we're doing. This is very, very normal.

And we absolutely had lots of in-depth contact with people during the study. But do you really think that people can just will themselves into better health because we were in contact with them? Their reporting was a self-survey but we also had biologic measurements (including MRIs) and outcome measurements like changes in gait, blood and bio markers, mood and quality of life that will be released in future papers.

The paper was not submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine and the AMA is not a body that approves papers--it's a political organization. There are plenty of subjects covered by the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine that are non-traditional, but most journals don't have the proper expertise to review the paper we wrote. They did.

/u/Dog-Plops

I'm glad you found the TEDx talk fascinating. I enjoyed doing it quite a bit and was thankful for the opportunity.

To be clear, I've never claimed to "cure" MS. I am not cured. I still have lesions on my spinal cord, and they have not reduced in size or number. My function, however, is dramatically better. (From a wheelchair to riding my bike in less than six months.) And my other symptoms (including face pain, fatigue and brain fog) have abated as well. This is not a cure, but it is clear and real improvement. Further, there are literally thousands of studies that have documented improvements in diabetes, mental health problems, cancers, heart disease and more by using intensive nutrition. This is not so different from my own research, and I'm using those well-established and peer-reviewed principles of intensive nutrition on different disease states.

This is definitely an example, as rationalwiki would define it, of treatment dealing with symptoms as they arise. If my symptoms hadn't arisen, I wouldn't have had to deal with them. But they did, so I did. I addressed in another question why it seems my current state is not just a "remission." I had been in a progressive diagnosis for four years and a steady decline for six years and when I leave the diet or lifestyle changes, I experience a dramatic flair up of MS-related pain.

The "Quack Miradna Warning" is on the website because it's true. To get FDA approval for a disease state, you need two studies at two different sites showing benefit, each costing about $4M. Therefore, there are no FDA-approved diets that have achieved or met that high bar. I absolutely hope, however, that the NIH will fund studies like mine so that the FDA could evaluate if this is effective or not.

I'm selling some products, but I've also been writing, speaking and lecturing (for free) about this issue for nearly six years. Part of the selling products is to sustain the education and outreach to the public and the other part is to fund the research that I'm doing. I'm sharing my personal experience because it was a positive one and it seems to have caused positive experiences in others as well.

People need to work with their personal physicians, just as I did. I think that the principles I discuss absolutely can play a role in those conversations and in peoples' recoveries. Primary care physicians--regardless of their thoughts on my story and research--will be thrilled that their patients want to eat more vegetables and less junk food, engage in more physical activity, reduce their stress levels and avoid exposure to toxins.

I absolutely hope to see increased prevention of Multiple Sclerosis, and I think that these principles can play a role in that. As far as I've read, MS cannot be cured. Better eating can help create health which reduces some symptoms, as it did for me and thousands of others--and there are thousands of studies that show intensive nutrition can have a positive impact on a person's health. These are the same time-tested and peer-reviewed principles being applied to different, specific disease states.

In other words, your first study showed that people with ms are capable of changing their diets and exercise habits, and are able to meditate, and are able to receive massages... And now youre looking into whether that actually does anything?

Well, a few things. First off, we started with ten people and only finished with six. Although you blithely dismissed it as something obvious, not everyone is capable of changing their diets or adopting this specific form of physical therapy. It's not easy, especially when you are very, very sick. So, yes, we had to do a safety and feasibility study at the request of our institutional review board. That's always the first step for the study of a new intervention.

And though it seems you meant it as an insult, the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine is a reputable journal--not the New England Journal of Medicine, of course, but reputable. And further, we needed a journal that had expertise in all of these areas, so that it could be properly peer-reviewed. My hope is that at some point in the future, we'll see more journals develop lifestyle expertise and acknowledge that environmental factors play a large role in day-to-day health.

And no, I'm not a homeopathic doctor. I'm an internal medicine physician.