My mom has multiple sclerosis. Recently, researchers found that two currently available drugs reverse de-myelinization in mice. The drugs are only approved for being applied to the skin, though—it hasn’t been proven to regulator’s standards that they’re safe for humans to swallow or inject.
Can anything be done to take advantage of this other than “sit and wait for years while Medical Science does more research”?
Can anything be done to take advantage of this other than “sit and wait for years while Medical Science does more research”?
This mostly depends on your attribute to risk and responsibility when things go wrong. No doctor is going to tell you “yeah, sure, try it out now” because that would open them up to significant risk and responsibility; if you tell your mom to try this and it doesn’t work out, then you’re taking on some risk and responsibility. She may not be interested in doing anything riskier than what’s been verified by medical science, and talking it over with her is the first step.
The next step is to ask her doctor about trials for this. It may be possible to be involved in human trials, though there is probably waiting involved.
Self-medication is possible. It seems unlikely that a doctor will help you figure out a correct dose, but it’s worth asking. In either event, you only have to do it once, and so it may be worth doing the paper-dive and finding the relevant textbooks to borrow (you’ll probably only need to read a few sections). If internal application is necessary, you’ll probably need to purchase the active ingredient directly. If you do decide to self-medicate, talk to your doctor about it. That’ll help prevent doing anything dangerous or any potentially foreseeable interactions between medications.
My mom has multiple sclerosis. Recently, researchers found that two currently available drugs reverse de-myelinization in mice. The drugs are only approved for being applied to the skin, though—it hasn’t been proven to regulator’s standards that they’re safe for humans to swallow or inject.
Can anything be done to take advantage of this other than “sit and wait for years while Medical Science does more research”?
This mostly depends on your attribute to risk and responsibility when things go wrong. No doctor is going to tell you “yeah, sure, try it out now” because that would open them up to significant risk and responsibility; if you tell your mom to try this and it doesn’t work out, then you’re taking on some risk and responsibility. She may not be interested in doing anything riskier than what’s been verified by medical science, and talking it over with her is the first step.
The next step is to ask her doctor about trials for this. It may be possible to be involved in human trials, though there is probably waiting involved.
Self-medication is possible. It seems unlikely that a doctor will help you figure out a correct dose, but it’s worth asking. In either event, you only have to do it once, and so it may be worth doing the paper-dive and finding the relevant textbooks to borrow (you’ll probably only need to read a few sections). If internal application is necessary, you’ll probably need to purchase the active ingredient directly. If you do decide to self-medicate, talk to your doctor about it. That’ll help prevent doing anything dangerous or any potentially foreseeable interactions between medications.
I think this is the kind of question MetaMed was created to answer. MetaMed’s website seems to be offline. Has the company shut down?
Yes. It would be helpful if they did a public postmortem, but I’m not sure there’s a way to do that that’s not ugly.