Why come to an ms center

I am Dr. Rowe, head of the MidAmerica Neuroscience Institute. I am also head of our MS Center. Today I would like to talk with you about if youre an MS patient why I believe you should be followed and treated in an MS center with no disrespect to my colleagues who also treat MS patients. There are approved drugs that they can use.

At our institute, we have tried to combine both the diagnostic capabilities for MS along with treatment modalities so that we optimize care for our patients. Remember there are three things you need to do, but you need to do all of these things when you are taking care of MS patients. One you need to be very picky about the diagnosis. Secondly you need to follow patients actively and not just tell them to come back if they have problems. The third thing is you cannot blame everything on MS.

Part of our center, though, is a fourth element and that is active research in both the basic science of MS as well as the clinical trials in MS. We started offering patients enrollment in clinical trials to be able to keep them abreast of the very cutting edge therapies in MS and to make available those therapies to them even before they are approved by the FDA, if they meet the very rigid criteria for most of these pharmaceutical industry studies. But only in that way can you hope to keep abreast of everything that is going on in MS and optimize treatment. We at MidAmerica Neuroscience Institute have done phase I studies, phase II studies, phase III studies, pharmaceutical industry study sponsored studies, and we have considerable experience with five clinical care coordinators, all attuned to responsive and empathetic patient care. Patient care, even in these research studies, always comes first. No one is thought of as a guinea pig in these studies. If we need to stop a study because the patient needs something that is out of the study, we do it. If a patient cannot really ethically be involved in a study that would involve a treatment that we do not believe would be best for that patient, we do not enroll in that study.

Again, those three things, to be very picky about the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, follow your patients actively, and do not blame everything on multiple sclerosis in an MS patient, are critical. That fourth element of being able to offer patients cutting edge therapies and being able to offer them the opportunity to participate in the development of new therapies for others is extremely important. Those are the things why I think patients with multiple sclerosis should be followed in an MS center such as ours.

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