Daily WOW: The Accidental Cure for MS

A team at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Canada has stumbled upon a treatment that may mean the end to the suffering of those affected by multiple sclerosis, and it may have come about thanks to a cancer treatment. Doctors treating patients diagnosed with both leukemia and MS found that by removing a patient’s bone marrow, purging it of the cancerous cells, and injecting it back into their bones, they would give their depleted immune systems a kick-start. It was after this treatment that they realized that the symptoms of MS were no longer apparent:

It’s not an easy treatment to undergo, because of some rather dramatic and debilitating side effects, and it’s currently only being offered to those with severe MS – patients who are essentially left without a functioning immune system for a period of time. That said, its potential is huge if doctors can figure out how to make it safer. “Everyone is hesitating to use the ‘c word’, but these patients are cured,” senior scientist Michael Rudnicki of the Ottawa Health Research Institute in Canada, who wasn’t directly involved in the research, told Vox. “[One of the trial patients] Jennifer Molson was in a wheelchair in a rehab center, unable to work. And now she’s skiing, she’s working, she got married, got her driver’s license. I think this is going to be the new standard of care for progressive MS.” “I took a leap of faith,” Molson told New Scientist. “I felt like I would be kicking myself if I didn’t take this chance.”

Sometimes all it takes is a leap of faith to find that we have the answers to the problems before us. The challenge we face is in recognizing when the Lord is guiding us toward profound discovery.

Behold, I make of you a threshing sledge, new, sharp, and having teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and crush them, and you shall make the hills like chaff. – Isaiah 41:15

We pray that these researchers continue to be a “threshing sledge” that may crush the “mountain” that is multiple sclerosis, and we thank them for giving us something at which to say Wow!