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Is it possible that Multiple Sclerosis can be cured? According to these medical mavericks, the answer is yes.

Dr Paul Thibault

This is a paradigm shift in the way we understand the disease.

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They argue that an infection is what triggers the disease.

Dr David Wheldon

The immune system sort of knows it's there but can't do much about it.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

Incredibly, the treatment has been right under our noses. Here, I explore an unpopular medical theory that has been flying under the radar until now.

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At this home in London lives a man who believes he's cured his wife of an incurable disease.

Dr David Wheldon

I don't like using the word 'cure' because it's sort of tempting providence, but I feel in my heart of hearts that the disease has gone.

Sarah Longlands

If it wasn't for David I would be probably dead or curled up in a corner of a nursing home, useless to the world.

Dr David Wheldon

Well, meet the artist, Sarah.

Sarah Longlands

Hello.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

Hi Sarah, how are you doing?

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Sarah, a talented artist, was diagnosed with MS in her twenties.

Sarah Longlands

My right arm started to go numb and I couldn't use it at all, it was just hanging in front of me.

Dr David Wheldon

Sarah was told that there was absolutely nothing that medicine could do for her. I, I was filled with fear. Here was a person I'd married - an alert, intelligent, bright, creative person, who, to be quite blunt, was, was losing her mind.

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It's widely accepted that MS is an auto-immune disease. The body's immune system destroys the myelin sheath around nerve fibres. Patients develop lesions in the brain and spinal cord, and eventually lose their ability to think and move.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

So this is, this is essentially damage in the brain?

Dr David Wheldon

It's damage, yes.

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David, an expert in infectious diseases who used to treat MS patients, drew on all his experience to formulate a revolutionary theory. He believed that Sarah's MS was triggered by an infection. The bacterium he honed in on was called Chlamydia Pneumoniae.

Dr David Wheldon

When one thinks of Chlamydia, one automatically thinks of venerally transmitted Chlamydia. Chlamydia Pneumoniae is a respiratory pathogen. It's spread by droplet infection - coughing and sneezing.

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Infection is so common that it's likely you've been exposed by the age of twenty. The bacteria finds shelter inside blood vessels and nerves, causing low-grade infection over decades. Convinced that Sarah's body was under attack from this bacterium, David worked tirelessly to find a solution. Together with a colleague in the US, he formulated a cocktail of antibiotics to eradicate this insidious bacterium.

Dr David Wheldon

It's been shown that a single antibiotic doesn't eradicate the organism, and these three antibiotics work together in a very specific way.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

How long does the treatment go for?

Dr David Wheldon

I think the treatment should be for a minimum of a year.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

A year?

Dr David Wheldon

Yes.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

That's a long time on antibiotics.

Dr David Wheldon

It, it is a long time, but it's a very, very difficult organism to eradicate.

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Sarah's neurologist insisted she would never regain her function. But David showed me the lesions on Sarah's MRI scans before and after treatment. The results were nothing short of miraculous.

Dr David Wheldon

I've never seen anything like it before. Some lesions have quite literally vanished. Sarah had been numb from the waist down and literally couldn't feel her legs. Sensation came back fairly quickly, in, in, in five or six months.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

Did this shock the neurologists?

Dr David Wheldon

Ah, the neurologist wouldn't see the scan. He says, he says, 'I'm not looking.'

Dr Maryanne Demasi

So did this, did this surprise you?

Dr David Wheldon

It absolutely shocked me. I think very few people know about the possibility of a chlamydial causation of MS, and therefore very few people will understand the possibility of treatment. The ignorance about this organism is immense.

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The problem is, this bacterium is notoriously difficult to detect in patients. Only a few labs in the world have the expertise.

Dr David Wheldon

Technique is a limiting factor, and to say you don't isolate something as difficult as this is, like I say, if you search a haystack for ten minutes and say, 'I see no needle', really you're not telling anyone very much.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

This kind of paradigm change in the way we understand and treat disease often causes dissention among the ranks. And this wouldn't be the first time that a radical theory was dismissed by mainstream medicine.

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Australian scientists, Warren and Marshall, went to extraordinary lengths to prove that stomach ulcers were not caused by stress, but by a bacterial infection. Marshall took the ultimate leap of faith and infected himself with the bug.

Barry Marshall

I said to my wife, 'I took the bacteria, I've got the illness.' And she said, 'You did what?'

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Fortunately a simple course of antibiotics cured him. The pair won a Nobel Prize in 2005.

Similarly in 2008, Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni was ridiculed when he proposed a whole new approach to MS. He claimed that instead of treating nerve damage, doctors should be focused on blood vessels. He believed that MS was due to a narrowing of the veins in the neck. Zamboni's theory gave hope to millions of MS sufferers, but many neurologists scoffed at the idea - including Vicki's.

Vicki Robinson

He was very dismissive, just didn't feel that it had anything to do with MS, and that was the end of the conversation.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

How did that make you feel?

Vicki Robinson

I was really angry, actually.

Dr Paul Thibault

The good news is that the flow on the right side is still very good.

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So Vicki turned to Australian vein specialist Dr Paul Thibault, who says in his experience with MS patients, Zamboni's theory has credibility.

Dr Paul Thibault

The veins have been known to be involved in Multiple Sclerosis since the disease was first described in the nineteenth century. But this fact has really been ignored by the neurologists in particular.

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Dr Thibault encouraged Vicki to have the controversial procedure called 'venoplasty' to correct the narrowing in her neck veins. The results were virtually instantaneous.

Vicki Robinson

The first thing that I noticed was my eyesight - amazing, just incredible. From pre-procedure in the waiting bay, couldn't read the signs on the wall, to coming out and being placed in the same bay and wow, there they were. Everything clear as a bell.

This is my mobility scooter that I used to have to use to go out anywhere - shopping, any of those sorts of things, before I had the venoplasty. Happily sitting here gathering dust now.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

So your neurologist doesn't know you've had a venoplasty done?

Vicki Robinson

No, no.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

So what does he attribute this miraculous improvement to?

Vicki Robinson

Oh, some patients for some reason just do better than others, and I just happened to be one of those, perhaps.

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It has to be said that not all patients have had the same success as Vicki, and there's a fifty per cent chance that her veins will narrow again. Dr Thibault agrees with Zamboni that MS is a vascular condition. But he also believes that narrowed veins are caused by a chronic infection, and like David Wheldon, his focus is on Chlamydia Pneumoniae.

Dr Paul Thibault

CPN is on my hit list because it is the bacteria that fits all the requirements. It is known to affect the lining of blood vessels and in particular, veins. It is known to involve the nervous system, is able to cause immune effects. So it fits all the features that we actually see in the symptomatology of MS.

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If you want epidemiological proof that MS is caused by an infection, you only have to look at the isolated population on the Faroe Islands.

Dr Paul Thibault

Prior to World War Two, there was no instance of MS in those islands. In 1940 the islands were occupied by British troops, and by 1945 there was a small epidemic of MS in the islands.

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From this it was postulated that British troops brought MS to the island, but if infection with Chlamydia Pneumoniae is so common, why doesn't everyone develop MS?

Dr Paul Thibault

Some other factor, like it could be low vitamin D levels, or genetic predisposition, makes them develop the secondary or persistent form of the disease, which affects the neurological tissues and the veins. I don't know why the neurologists aren't offering them at least Minocycline which has been shown in a number of studies to benefit MS.

Dr Maryanne Demasi

Why, why are neurologists turning their back on this?

Dr Paul Thibault

I think the neurologists have gone down this track for many years and they would have trouble admitting that they may have gone the wrong way. And therefore they continue on with the same line of thought.

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For a neurologist's perspective, I visited respected MS researcher Associate Professor Robert Heard.

Assoc Prof Robert Heard

We'd love to see more data about it but ...

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In a candid moment he did admit that Dr Thibault's theory was plausible.

Assoc Prof Robert Heard

In an unguarded moment, maybe after a drink or two, a couple of neurologists might say to each other, 'You know, it just has to be an infection, doesn't it?' And in fact I've had that exact conversation with well-known MS specialists. But we just can't put our finger on it.

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But despite the anecdotal evidence, Dr Heard warns that responsible treatment is all about evidence-based medicine.

Assoc Prof Robert Heard

If we're going to do experiments in patients, we're going to use them as guinea-pigs, we need to have that clinical trial informed by some solid science.

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But clinical trials to obtain solid science requires funding, and getting it is virtually impossible. Why haven't the clinical trials been done?

Dr Paul Thibault

The problem is that the antibiotics used have been around for many, many years. They're all off patent, they are inexpensive, and there is no profit in it.

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So as the debate rages on, what hope is there for MS sufferers?

Dr Paul Thibault

We're looking at treating the cause of the disease, and therefore, if we can get patients early enough, we could cure MS.

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But it's this sort of statement that worries neurologists.

Assoc Prof Robert Heard

I think people have used the C-word and talked about cures for as long as MS has existed. And I think to use the word 'cure' at this stage of our scientific understanding is highly irresponsible.

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Dr Thibault has decided to put Vicki on antibiotics to see if she makes further progress. Like Vicki, David Wheldon knows that clinical trials will take time, and it's time that MS patients can't afford.

Dr David Wheldon

The clinical trials are not there. It's ... that has to be said, it's, um, and I wasn't going to wait for them either, you know. I'd be a widower now if I was waiting for, for clinical trials. Sorry.

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It may be too early to tell if we stand before a cure for MS, but if we do, these men will be remembered as the pioneers.