Healing Multiple Sclerosis by Ann Boroch: Preface

Reprinted with permission from Healing Multiple Sclerosis: Diet, Detox & Nutritional Makeover for Total Recovery by Ann Boroch For more information, visit www.annboroch.com or email ann@annboroch.com

My doctor leafed through page after page of my medical chart—EEG results, neurological exams, evoked potential tests… I had undergone two weeks of tests hoping to learn what was causing the spasms, numbness and tingling, and other neurological symptoms that had left me barely able to walk on my own.

“Well, Ann,” he said, “the good news is, you don’t have cancer. The bad news is… you have MS.” With those words, I became a statistic, one of an estimated 500,000 North Americans, and three million people worldwide, who are afflicted by the debilitating disease of multiple sclerosis.

“… Incurable … experiment with chemotherapy … slow the inevitable deterioration…”
He went on speaking, but I was so much in shock that his words made no sense to me. Traditional Western medicine had failed to cure me of serious mononucleosis five years earlier. I had no confidence that it could help me now.

I left his office, and after two weeks of physical suffering, mental turmoil, and emotional torture, I turned my back on the traditional medical treatments for MS. I was only twenty-four, and terrified, but I refused to accept the prospect of spending my life in a wheelchair. “I will not be another MS statistic,” I promised myself. And slowly, bit by bit, I created by own self-care program based on integrative medicine methods.

Four tumultuous years later, I had reversed MS.

You must understand that health is more than just the physical body. Health means a balance of the body, mind, emotions, and spirit. When you experience a chronic disease, all facets of the self must be examined. This means moving beyond the symptoms to address diet, lifestyle, stress, exercise, negative thoughts, fear-based emotions, and self-limiting belief systems.

Eventually, I hope, the usual paradigm in Western medicine will shift to a realization that even if two people have the same disease, they must be treated as individuals based on knowledge that each person’s history is unique, that health is more than just treating the physical body, and that it is essential to go to the root cause. Then cures will be the rule, not the exception to the rule.

Most important, health is a choice. Yes, the body has an innate inner intelligence called homeostasis that works at keeping itself balanced. But this is not enough to maintain health if you are making unhealthy choices, entertaining negative thoughts, bombarding your body with depleted foods, overwhelming it with stress, and holding on to fear-based emotions. Whenever you make the apparently simple choice of what to eat each day, you are actually choosing whether you want health—or not.

Even as I took the first steps on my healing journey, it was clear to me that I would be moving, not only toward achieving recovery, but also toward helping others to move through the complexities of autoimmune disease. Today, I am a naturopath with a nine-year practice during which I’ve seen more than one thousand patients for various health conditions. Based on both my personal and my professional experience, it is my responsibility, and my passion, not just to educate you about the causes of MS and how to reverse it, but also to inspire you with the knowledge that you can triumph.

Society, your family, and your peers have more or less conditioned you to believe that you are powerless when it comes to MS—that drugs are your only options for living with this diagnosis. That is not so. There is a hidden truth to healing that has always been with us. This truth is the incredible individual power you possess to transform yourself—your body, your spirit, your mind, and your emotions. Making a choice to become healthy and then backing it up with belief and conviction are the keys to coming into your own power and turning around any disease.

Appeared in the April/May 2007 issue of Innerchange.