Brandon Beaber, MD, is a multiple sclerosis (MS) neurologist based in Southern California. He shares assurance for those newly diagnosed with MS, and outlines what he thinks their first steps should be in adapting to life with MS.

Well, the good thing is MS usually isn’t an emergency. People have time to learn about the disease and make decisions that are right for them. There’s some exceptions — people with very severe attacks who are in the hospital and need urgent treatment. But the typical person I might see in the outpatient setting, maybe they had optic neuritis, pain and vision loss in one eye, they were treated with steroids, they’re improving a little bit, and they had MRI scans which were consistent with MS, and they’re seeing me for confirmation of the diagnosis and some long-term treatments.

I think it is important to learn a little bit about the disease. You don’t have to be an expert. There are a lot of great resources online like the National MS Society, MS Association of America, Bionews, and various social media content creators.

And, you know, unlike some diseases where you may wanna leave it to the doctors — like if you have appendicitis in the emergency room, you probably don’t wanna be arguing with the surgeon about different techniques — I think it’s important to be a little bit of a self-advocate.

And if you think about it, in modern clinical trials, the placebo group, the group not getting any drug, only has an attack about once every two years. And so, you know, in the long run, MS is bad, but people certainly have time to make a decision. And it’s important to research things before jumping into something you’re not comfortable with.

The other thing is MS is fairly commonly misdiagnosed. There was a study done by some of my colleagues in Los Angeles at UCLA in Cedars-Sinai, and they found that out of people who were referred to them for a second opinion on treatment who were diagnosed with MS, 18% of them actually had something else.

So if there’s any question about the diagnosis, get a second opinion because I’ve seen people who were misdiagnosed and treated inappropriately for years or even decades.