Medication and Supplements
In my experience, there is no single silver bullet that fixes MS. Any med, supplement, cleanse, patch, or therapy that promises results in a few months is almost always a lie. To be fair, I have tried most of them and often found disappointment and a lighter wallet.
I've also learned that Newton's law applies here: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Any medicine, supplement, or therapy with enough power to change things has a side effect. Drinking water fixes dehydration and makes you pee. An MS med may reduce new lesion formation and also increase infection risk. Sometimes the trade-off is acceptable. Sometimes it isn't.
Results also take time. Like most people with MS, I had symptoms building for years before diagnosis. Expecting resolution after a few months of medication feels unrealistic. For me, results have come from making careful, sustained changes over a long period.
Everyone's path is different. The right combination of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical tools is personal, and mine has shifted considerably over time. The point is that the toolkit is wider than most people realize.
Disease Modifying Therapy (DMT)
While it is true my recovery out of a wheelchair happened in the 7+ years I have been off DMT, I want to be clear: I'm not anti-medication. I did more than a million dollars worth of disease-modifying therapy over the years, and those drugs bought me real time. I still ended up in a wheelchair for five years.
An allergic reaction knocked me off my DMT in 2019, and a cascade of circumstances — the pandemic, insurance changes, a cross-country move — disrupted my access to infusions long enough that my path diverted away from pharmaceutical DMT for several years.
By the time I circled back to reassess in 2025, six years off medication, my EDSS disability score had dropped more than two full points and I hadn't had a flare in over five years. That made it genuinely difficult to evaluate whether restarting a DMT made sense — the standard measures of success were already moving in the right direction.
That calculus may change, and medication may re-enter the picture.
My recovery has happened while off disease-modifying therapy — but that's not a recommendation. It's a data point. My N=1 research approach shapes how I think about all of this.
Plant-Based and Natural Medicines
Not all medicine comes from a pharmaceutical lab. Some of the most effective tools in my protocol sit at the intersection of diet, supplement, and medicine — and the line between those categories is blurrier than most people think.
I've consolidated a significant portion of my pharmaceutical load into plant-based alternatives, working with my doctors throughout. Cannabis is the clearest example: in my personal experience, and in consultation with physicians, it has replaced six different pharmaceutical medications previously prescribed for pain, spasticity, blood pressure, depression, and more. Trading the combined side effects of six separate drugs for those of one plant medicine was, for me, a good trade.
Functional mushrooms occupy similar territory. Lion's Mane, Chaga, Turkey Tail, and Reishi have been part of my daily protocol for years — most of them going directly into my Garbage Disposal Green Smoothie. They're food, supplement, and medicine simultaneously, and I've found them worth the long-term commitment.
"Natural" doesn't always mean better than synthetic — but it can mean a legitimate alternative worth considering.
Supplements
My supplement protocol has been shaped by a functional medicine doctor and ongoing biomarker testing. What I've found useful over time includes vitamin D3, magnesium, fish oil, and alpha lipoic acid, among others.
Because everyone's biology is different, I won't prescribe specific doses or combinations — that's a conversation to have with your own physician or functional medicine practitioner. But targeted supplementation, guided by actual data rather than guesswork, has been a consistent piece of my MS puzzle.
These aren't quick fixes. They're long-game tools that show up in the data gradually.
How do I know any of this is working? Biomarker testing is how I track what's actually moving — inflammation markers, immune function, and more." Read more →
A Note on the Toolkit
The through-line across all of this is the same logic that runs through every pillar of 4MS: I'm building and maintaining a biological system, and I want every input to earn its place. Medications, supplements, and plant medicines aren't separate from diet, movement, and mindset — they're part of the same integrated picture.