remove the things that you can do to help yourself on a daily basis to live a healthy life with or without multiple sclerosis.
And I think the other important thing is that we have to set expectations. So there are many different treatments for multiple sclerosis. And the treatment landscape has changed dramatically just even in the past five to seven years. So when I started practicing, there were only about three or four treatments for MS and all of them were injection medicines where people had to basically, inject themselves with needles at home. There were a couple of medicines that were given through ivy, but they were for what we consider very severe cases of the disease.
And then about eight years ago, we had the first oral medication or the first pill approved for MS. And since that time we’ve had six or seven new drugs that have been approved and literally won almost every year. So there’s really been a revolution in the way that we treat MS. And that’s been really great for our patients because it gives them a lot of options. But also we don’t have to tolerate as much disability as we used to.
So back in the day, we used to say, well, if you had a new spot, let’s try to stick it out with this medicine because we didn’t have any other options. But now we have enough options that if you’re having difficulty, if you’re having new lesions on MRI or if you’re having more disability, there are other options where we can change the medicine to try to stop the progression of the disease.
So when we talk about expectations there two things that we’re trying to affect with our medications. We are trying to affect the person who has MS and then we’re also trying to affect their MRIs. We do want to change or keep MRIs from