Reversing multiple sclerosis: the inspiring story of Dr. Terry Wahls
In a nutshell
An inspirational story of reversing multiple sclerosis with diet and lifestyle
“Food is the bedrock of health. Our food choices can either lead to disease or create health and vitality”
Recovery is a highly individual process, be patient and persevere
This is the remarkable story of Dr. Terry Wahls, an American clinical professor of medicine. In her early life, she ran marathons, climbed mountains, cross-country skied, and was a very accomplished practitioner of tae kwon do. Dr. Wahls developed incapacitating multiple sclerosis (MS) which her doctors told her was not curable. She chose not to believe them and instead reversed the symptoms of her disease, reverting to a healthy, active lifestyle.
“Food is the bedrock of health. Our food choices can either lead to disease or create health and vitality”
MS symptoms and disease development
Dr. Wahls experienced her first symptoms in 1980 and initially chose to ignore them until that became too difficult. Twenty years after the first appearance of symptoms, she was officially diagnosed in 2000 with debilitating MS. Thereafter, the wasting disease developed quickly. By 2002, she could no longer play soccer with her children. Just one year later in 2003, she was exhausted by the simple act of walking between rooms in her hospital practice. By 2004 her core muscles had deteriorated so much that she required a tilt/recline wheel chair. By 2007 she was spending most of her day in a zero-gravity chair. She was just 57 years old.
Conventional medical treatment
In her book [1], Dr. Wahls describes how, as a medical practitioner, she formed rapid diagnoses and treated disease symptoms with pharmaceutical drugs. She followed that approach initially to manage the progression of her MS.
Working with her physician, she tried Mitoxantrone, a chemotherapy drug, but that didn’t help. Next she turned to Tysabri, a new potent immune-suppressing drug but couldn’t continue because it was deemed unsafe and pulled from the market. Finally, she tried CellCept, a transplant drug intended for immune cell suppression. She developed chronic mouth ulcers without positively influencing her disease.
Dr. Wahls had been failed by conventional medicine and was faced with a bedridden life. Fortunately, in 2002, during the course of her conventional treatment, Dr. Wahls’ physician suggested she look at the work of Ashton Embry’s MS charity.
Her long road to recovery from MS
Ashton Embry
Ashton Embry is a geologist with a Ph.D. and in 1995 his son was diagnosed with MS. He used his research background to immerse himself in the scientific literature for MS to figure out likely causes and to develop a therapy for his son.
Embry discovered evidence that the food we eat can cause the onset and progression of MS. He decided to make this information freely available through a registered charity.
Many people now experience success in halting or greatly slowing MS with nutritional strategies. His son is in excellent health with no MS symptoms and has his own website. This is another resource for strategies to get healthy and remain free of MS symptoms.
A period of research and self-experimentation
Reading the Embry website led Dr. Wahls to Dr. Lauren Cordain who linked changes in the human diet to the broader incidence of chronic disease. All of the things she was reading about were outside of her area of expertise and Dr. Wahls often found it difficult to understand and absorb. Reading Embry she wasn’t expecting “stunning results” and realized things could take as long as five years.
As a patient she began experimenting on herself, often requiring fundamental changes to her lifestyle. She had been a vegetarian since her college days but learned that she’d have to reduce or eliminate certain dietary staples such as grain, dairy, and legumes. This was necessary because excessive dietary carbohydrates lead to excess insulin and chronic inflammation.
Dr. Wahls switched to a Paleo diet that included more animal-based ingredients. She also started to understand the central role of cells and their mitochondria (where energy is produced). This led to an understanding of how certain vitamins minerals, amino acids, antioxidants, essential fatty acids help mitochondria and brain cells, and stop the immune system attacking her brain cells. She started supplementing her diet with those things specifically.
In addition to dietary changes, Dr. adopted regular E-stim (a form of muscular electro-stimulation) therapy.
Through trial and error, she could see that her dietary supplements were helping. She finally had more energy. She was beginning to arrest the progress of her MS and would achieve dramatic restoration of her health and function. In her own words:
“What I learned changed forever how I saw the battling worlds of health and disease”
The more she read, the more she learned, and this led to developing a modified Paleo-based diet incorporating a range of foodstuffs containing nutrients with particular benefit to brain health.
Replacing supplements with whole food
Having experienced the health benefits of supplementation, Dr. Wahls’ next step was to include in her regular dietary intake those foods which contained naturally high amounts the nutrients she was benefitting from.
This makes intuitive sense to me because supplements tend to be very simple chemical substitutes for the real thing. Nutrient dense real food on the other hand, contains complex mixtures of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and phytochemicals (found in plants and animals that eat them). Such is the complexity of real food that it is impossible to identify all of its constituents and their potential synergistic (e.g., 1 + 1 = more than 2) interactions. In my view, and Dr. Wahls’ apparently, it is better simply to trust that the appropriate real foods will optimally support our cells and their mitochondria.
A comprehensive list of foodstuffs which Dr. Wahls identified as containing nutrients with particular benefit to brain health is provided in her excellent book [1].
Recovery
Dr. Wahls understood that disease begins when our cells are starved of the things they need to conduct the biochemistry of life properly.
“I finally understood what I had to do to provide my cells with all the building blocks of life they needed to heal. I was doing it and it was working”
She had begun by eliminating the things that were harming her cells and replacing them with a healthy lifestyle. She now combines her specialized Paleo diet with regular E-stim sessions and meditation.
Dr. Wahls now leads a pretty normal life. She is walking, riding her bicycle, enjoying her family, working, and she wrote a book…!
A new way to practice medicine
Understandably, Dr. Wahls’ experience has changed the way she practices medicine. Gone are the days of the quick diagnosis followed by treatment with pharmaceutical drugs. Now she employs a functional medicine approach to understand and treat the root-cause, not just the symptoms. She believes that diet and lifestyle can be used to address T2D, high BP, high cholesterol, mood disorders, PTSD, traumatic brain injury instead of relying on drugs.
“In patient after patient, I watched symptoms and the need for drugs decrease as diet and lifestyle improved”
Recovery is a highly individual process, be patient
One of the key things to understand about reversing the effects of bad diet and lifestyle is that each of us is very different from another, even within families. These differences can manifest themselves in the rate at which dietary and lifestyle insults can cause ill-health and the rate at which we can reverse that process.
After we eliminate a poor diet and lifestyle and replace with a healthier approach, recovery may be related to the natural rate at which our affected cells are replaced. Consider the following replacement rates [1]:
1- to 2-weeks - gut lining
1- to 3- years – liver and kidney
7- to 10-years – myelin insulation around nerves in brain
15-years – heart muscle
20-years – minerals in bone and teeth
Every day, unhealthy mitochondria and whole cells can be replaced with healthy ones. Our job is to stop harming them and give them the tools they need to do their job.
“What your cells use to fuel the chemistry of life comes directly from what you feed yourself. The food you eat has everything to do with how well your body functions, how likely it will be that your genetic susceptibilities will be activated, and whether or not you develop a chronic disease – as well as how able you are able to come back from the disabilities that chronic disease has inflicted on you.”
If you’re interested in the podcast that initially made me aware of Dr, Wahls’ inspirational story, here you go
Summary
I find this story inspiring on so many levels. The time it took Dr. Wahls to reject her medical training, understand the scientific literature, and develop a dietary approach reminds me my own experience to understand heart disease. It took me three years to read up on the issues and begin to understand why my doctors’ advice hadn’t worked and may even have caused my heart disease.
Understanding how dietary nutrition and genetic vulnerability interact is something that took me significant time to understand. Dr. Wahls puts it so well:
“Cellular nutrition is everything. It is the very basis of health. It all comes down to the cell, because when cells malfunction, eventually organs malfunction. When organs malfunction, eventually you malfunction. The disease you have today began in your cells, and while the susceptibility to that disease may have a genetic component, whether those genes get turned on or off has everything to do with what you are giving your cells and what you aren’t giving them. It’s never too late to turn your cellular dysfunction around, but unless you know how to do this, based on what cells actually require, you’re just guessing about what you should or shouldn’t do.”
Her experience has cemented my now core belief that many of the illnesses I previously believed were chronic diseases, are in fact caused by malnutrition and can be improved or eliminated with a proper human diet. I’ll leave you with another example of Dr. Wahls’ excellent insight:
“If I can rise up from a tilt-recline wheelchair by changing the way I live my life, consider what the people you love, your community, your country, and the world would look like if everybody began eating and living to optimally fuel their cells. We could restore health and vitality to the world and dramatically lower the cost of health care, saving billions of dollars. What choice will you make? How will you choose to live the rest of your life? With disability? Or with vitality? It’s all up to you.”
Previous inspiring stories
Type 2 Diabetes - Dr. David Unwin, MD, is a general practitioner based in the northwest of England. He is known for pioneering a low-dietary-carbohydrate approach to the treatment and elimination of type-2 diabetes
Schizophrenia – Psychiatrist Chris Palmer describes how a seventy-year-old obese schizophrenic patient was advised to go on the ketogenic diet for weight loss. After just two weeks she began to lose weight and noticed an improvement in her psychotic symptoms. Thirteen years later, she had learned how to take care of herself, is 150 pounds lighter, symptom-free, and not taking her old medications
References
Wahls, T. (2014) The Wahls Protocol: A radical way to treat all chronic autoimmune conditions using Paleo principles. London: Penguin Random House