Megan Beier, PhD, is a health and rehabilitation psychologist specializing in multiple sclerosis (MS) at the Rowan Center for Behavioral Medicine. She shares a realistic portrait of what people with MS can expect from their disease-modifying therapies.

So some of the misconceptions about MS treatments that I hear the most are that people feel like there’s gonna be an immediate impact on acute symptoms.

So they might think that starting a disease-modifying medication will reduce the symptoms that they are experiencing during an exacerbation or that it will turn the clock back, that those symptoms will go away or that they won’t have them anymore — it will reverse them.

Often with MS, at least disease-modifying medications, we are really treating for the future, not the present, which can be really challenging. It impacts somebody’s motivation for continuing on a medication if they’re not seeing an immediate benefit.

That might be a little bit different for things like symptom management, where you might see an immediate impact on the symptoms that one’s exploring. And also I think that there’s some misconceptions about the differences between symptomatic treatment and disease-modifying treatment.