Multiple sclerosis (MS) patient advocate Dominic Shadbolt, of the U.K., was diagnosed with MS in 1994. He shares comforting words for people who fear taking MS medications.

I think if you’re not used to them — I was very fortunate — I did a master’s in research methodology, which really got you to drill down on looking at how figures and statistics are expressed, but you know, that was kind of an accident. But people read the side effects in isolation. And I think the big failing of most of us, sometimes, is not taking into account the whole picture.

Because MS is — it’s not like breaking your arm, you know, where your arm’s broken and you’re gonna get a cast or whatever. But you’re really medicating for something, like I said, that’s 10, 20, 30 years in the future. And the downsides of being undertreated or not effectively treated are really bad, but they’re hard to conceive of.

So you need to be able to hold them in your head and say — let’s just say, with MS, the average time to not being able to work from a diagnosis is about 10 years. And so if you could extend that out and make that 15 or 20, it would suddenly make the potential side effects — and I stress potential — less impactful.

But I also say, if you take a bottle of aspirin and you read the data sheet, the patient information leaflet that comes with it, you’d run screaming from the room. You know, but we’re all used to taking aspirin if something hurts and, hey, it helps make it go away.