Aaron Boster

And the immune system is the part of your body that fights off bad guys like foreign invaders.

So when some kid coughs on you and gives you a virus, the immune system identifies it as a bad guy and whoops it.

And the immune system is not supposed to attack yourself.

And so if the immune system sees part of you, it should just be like, hey, me, and leave you alone.

Now, sometimes the immune system makes an error in judgment.

And it identifies part of your body as a foreign invader.

And so that's called an autoimmune condition.

And there's a lot of autoimmune conditions that people are pretty familiar with.

So for example, if the immune system beats up on the pancreas, we call that childhood diabetes.

Or if the immune system beats up on the joints of the hands and feet, we call that rheumatoid arthritis.

So I explained that multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune condition where the immune system unfortunately attacks the holiest of holies, the supercomputer that runs the body, the brain, and the superhighway, the spinal cord that takes the information up and down.

And depending on where that attack occurs determines what the human being experiences.

So if the immune system attacks the nerve that runs the left eye, the human unfortunately is not going to see very well and it's going to hurt like the dickens when they move their eye.

That's called an optic neuritis.

Or if the immune system attacks the spinal cord, then the legs may be numb and tingly or weak and the down there is the bowel, bladder, bedroom part of our bodies don't work very well.

So in a nutshell, that's how I like to try to help introduce MS to somebody.

So there are different camps of MS neurologists.

I'm in the camp, I believe it's actually one condition with different phenotypes.

Although you could talk to somebody else who would say, nah, but you're stuck talking to me.

And when we talk about primary progressive MS, what we're really saying is the human being