When a patient is first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, there are a lot of emotions. There’s a lot of things that are often running through people’s minds.
The first question often is why me? Or how did this happen or what’s going on? And so often what I try to do in that first visit when someone is diagnosed is to really explain what the disease is in terms that they can understand.
I also talk about things like the risk for MS. Many people have questions about if they’re family members or children will inherit MS or if they should have children. And so we have many of those conversations. And so it often is a very long conversation. I usually broach initially treatments, but we usually don’t have a very in-depth conversation about treatments because there’s just so much going on. There are so many questions and I really want to make sure that people absorb the information.
So we spend a lot of time just kind of going through the diagnosis, the risk factors, the things that they can do to help themselves on a daily basis. And then we kind of talk about the goals of treatment. But if possible, I usually schedule a follow-up visit within a couple of weeks and then we come back and sit down, answer more questions that they may have or that they found their family members may have. And then we also talk about treatments at that time.
I think that when we talk about treatment plans for MS, we’re talking about several different things. I always tell all of my patients that there’s a role medicine plays, but there’s also a role that you play and there is no medicine that will