Doc calls costly therapy ‘robbery’

Clinics charging multiple sclerosis patients thousands of dollars for an unproven treatment are basically stealing, an internationally recognized stroke researcher and Robarts Research Institute scientist said Monday.
“That is robbery. . . . It is quackery because nobody knows yet if it works,” said Dr. David Spence, director of the Stroke Prevention and Atherosclerosis Research Centre in London.
News reports that Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni last year discovered a treatment for MS that involved unblocking veins have sparked intense interest from people with the disease.
Proponents say the procedure can reduce, and even eliminate, the damage from MS.
Clinics offering the controversial angioplasty procedure have sprung up in Mexico, India, Kuwait, Bulgaria and other countries.
In Canada, the procedure hasn’t been approved and patients have to pay the bills themselves, some as high as $20,000, if they opt for foreign treatment.
Several MS patients from London have said they will have the procedure after seeing media reports and watching YouTube videos showingpatients getting out of wheelchairs and walking up stairs.
“It is a procedure that should only be done experimentally for now because it is based on an unproven theory,” Spence said.
“For sure we would all love it to be true, it would be great to have a new treatment for multiple sclerosis, but there are a whole bunch of problems.”
One of the problems with the theory that multiple sclerosis is connected to blocked veins is that narrowed veins in the brain can cause strokes. But the part of the brain affected by strokes is not the same part affected by MS, Spence said.
In addition, many MS lesions are found in the spinal cord, not in the brain, so the narrowing of veins in the brain is not going to cause those lesions, he said.
“The theory is implausible because it doesn’t bear any relationship to what we already know about these things,” he said. “Everything we know about MS so far indicates it is an inflammatory condition.”
Spence likened the current rush of patients to seek the foreign treatment with laetrile, an extract from almonds that was touted as a cancer cure but was later discredited.
As for the testimonials from patients who reported dramatic improvements after the procedure, Spence said many people, including some doctors, don’t understand the placebo effect.
“It is very real, very powerful.”
Spence cited a study of the placebo effect at the University of Western Ontario in which medical students were given dummy pills and told they were being given a heart medication. Tests on the students recorded some had nausea, vomiting and high blood pressure. Some fainted, and some had low blood pressure.
“They recorded definite physical abnormalities from taking this placebo tablet because they had expectations it would have some affect on their cardiovascular system,” Spence said.
“You cannot study a new therapy without assigning a certain proportion of participants in a study to a control, a proper double-blinded control where the patient doesn’t know what treatment he or she is receiving and the person evaluating the response doesn’t know what treatment the patient is receiving,” Spence said.
Such a study should only take about a year, he said.