A place to start

Some interesting stuff came over the wire, speaking about a new site IConquerMS.org, which seems to include stuff you don't hear often from the MS Medical cloud, which seems to fixate on human-disconnected lab stuff, but this time is actually asking patients about their human experience.

This, I can certainly get behind. The conundrum for me is that I hang with/get nearly all of my medical care from, people who live in the Oriental rather than Occidental Medicine world, in the qualitative rather than quantitative world.

The problem I have with "I conquer MS" is that MS doesn't exist. It's not an entity that anyone or anything can "conquer..." Certainly from the Oriental Medicine POV,  MS is just the name you Westerners have given your symptoms. Places like India, in which MS onsets are extremely rare, casually report that they treat MS all the time with diet and yoga, no problems. And, compared to the Interferon Madness that a lot of Western MS treatment plans involve (God help us, Tysabri), zero side effects.

I suspect that Western World doesn't tend to follow such paths because (a) such paths tend to be qualitative not crunch-the-numbers quantitative, and (b) you can't turn yoga into a cash cow, like the latest MS drug du jour tends to try to do. It's oral! $100 per pill! At least once a day! For the rest of your life! But it's oral!

I don't follow that road. If you choose to, go with God.

For my path, what needs conquering is myself. Especially my ego, which is too often in my way, far more intensely than just being stuck in a wheelchair.

So there's a challenge for you. As Ram Dass says, "Be here now."

Those three little words encapsulate a real challenge.... Something at which too many of us, such as myself, have become practiced at not doing.

So... I conquer ego.

That's a good enough, and hard enough, place to start.