Response from another friend

In response to my posting of Tarja's messages, my friend Dave (a non-MSer) had this to say:

Wow, your friend wrote: "there are at least four reasons for MS: autoimmune, congenital errors in veins (Liberation), bacterial infections (affecting veins), and trauma. They all seems to cause a domino-like chain reaction, all leading to same symptoms and diagnosis. "

If this turns out to have any validity then it would suggest that messing with the immune system would be the last thing to screw with.  Also, the discussion of infections causing vein issues is interesting.   "Hello, medical community ... are you listening?"

I finished a book called 'crowd sourcing' a while back and the discussion of non professionals solving problems outside of their field was quite interesting.  One guy with a chemistry degree made millions solving tough problems said "I don't even look at chemistry problems, they are dominated by chemists, it clouds my objectivity".

Is a bit (a lot) of this happening in medicine?

It does sound like the CA (California) people you saw were fairly enlightened.