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Originally Posted by JohninGpt
Pretty close. The disease I have, chronic lymphocitic thyroiditis, aka Hashimoto's encephalopathy, is caused by my thyroid malfunctioning and causing my immune system to attack my brain. It damn near did me in about 1 1/2 years ago. It's a rare desease so it took a while for it to be diagnosed, meanwhile I was a babbling idiot in the hospital attacking everything that moved (did I mention it made me a tad aggressive?), once the figured out what the problem was I got steroid therapy which suppressed my immune system and allows me to function pretty much normally. I do have occasional relapses and I'm very succeptable to colds, rashes, and pretty much anything else.
I think MS is treated in pretty much the same manner. When I have a relapse I usually get steroid infusions alongside MS patients getting the same thing (solumedrol).
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Man, oh man. I'm very sorry to hear about this, Mr. JohninGpt. Very sorry, indeed.
The treatment makes sense given what they know about auto-immune, though. They're shutting down the immune system which is reacting incorrectly to some influence. It would be wonderful if they could turn that around, identify the cause that is affecting the immune system, and address that instead. There's always hope, though, and advances like this might open the door to a true cure.
Meanwhile, here's to your health, my friend.
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