my experiences with OMS - YMMV

YMMV - written abbreviation for Your Mileage May Vary: used, for example on social media and in text messages and emails, to mean that you understand people may have a different opinion or experience to yours:
"Their first album is better, but of course YMMV."

During my relapse in summer I was advised to stop following the OMS diet by my MS team. Their argument was that there wasn't enough evidence to base relying on such a limiting diet in order to "overcome" Multiple Sclerosis. Truth be told, I was always a little uncomfortable with that word anyway - it's a chronic illness, you can learn to live with it, but the idea of "overcoming" it completely, while undeniably attractive, is a little misleading.

Since then I have been following a pescatarian diet - it feels pretty healthy and I was never all that fussed about meat (although I still get the sweats when I remember The Day of Two Burgers when we were in New York a few years back).

I remain a member of the OMS Facebook group (although as a silent observer).

Why? Probably because there's something undeniably attractive about the idea that a few relatively simple changes to your diet and lifestyle could have a positive impact on your health. And it's still cool to see how passionate and committed the members are.

But some aspects make me a little uncomfortable, like how group members with no medical qualifications can encourage other people to try things like - for example - a Fast Mimicking Diet.

Members are also quick to ascribe varying levels of health to things they've eaten. Forgive me if I'm wrong but isn't MS a fluctuating, progressive and entirely individual health condition? At the end of the day, members of that group - including a number of newly diagnosed people - are pretty vulnerable.

I remember the post in the group which linked to research which showed that following a plant based diet can dramatically lower your lymphocyte count. I asked how the OMS diet can be recommended for people who are on a Disease Modifying Therapy that already lowers lymphocyte count (which is closely monitored by ms nurses), regardless of diet. The founder of the lifestyle, George Jelinek himself, came on to the thread and effectively told me to carry on regardless (I'd already stopped by that point).

Recently George Jelinek shared an article from the OMS website with this eminently clickable title: Disease-modifying drugs are not effective for the average person with MS aged 53 or more.

One Facebook group member pointed out the selectivity of the headline, calling it sensationalist when the authors of the paper themselves highlighted the limitations of the meta data they'd used. However, this and other linked articles continue to gain traction.

Now I'm not in any way saying that the originators of OMS have any sinister agenda. Neither was the lifestyle responsible for my two relapses this summer - considering all the stress we've been under for the past year or so, this was very much IN THE POST. Plus there are still a lot of aspects of the OMS program which I firmly believe in - one being the importance of daily meditation, another being the need to take advice on medication options.

But I think one of the most enduring aspects of OMS for me is the importance of maintaining Hope (which to my mind has a similar chemical compound to Stoicism and Positive Thinking).

When I started following the OMS lifestyle, I genuinely felt better in myself - thoughts were clearer, and physically I felt less sluggish. Was that simply hope, coupled with the positivity of trying to do SOMETHING? Who knows.

This last year, I have had a lot of that positivity (which was always in pretty short supply) knocked out of me by one thing and another. And one of the key elements I think that OMS provides (which is probably the same for exercise, DMTs, yogic flying, etc.) is the sense that you're taking control of your health and future in some way. This can only be a good thing.

But once I lost faith in OMS, it stopped working for me. It's like my friend told me when I started Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - it's a good form of therapy if you're prepared to go along with it. If you go into it with cynicism, it's probably not for you.

With starting on Tysabri, I'm investing a lot of hope in a new medical intervention. And although it's too early to say if it's working or not, I'm doing something based on the best advice available - I'm not feeling any worse on it, for a start, plus I won't forget to take my tablets or do my injections.

Like I said above, the people in that group are if not vulnerable then at the very least open to suggestion - and they certainly invest a lot of weight in any pronouncements made by Professor Jelinek.

I've been brewing these thoughts for a while, and that FB post tipped me over into actually trying to gather everything together.

There ARE worse things you can do for your health than eating better. And I still think that doing ANYTHING to get control of your health is by its very nature a positive thing - psychologically at least.

I do not judge people for their decisions. We're all grazing at the all-you-can-eat salad bar of MS interventions and there certainly don't seem to be any answers which are worse than others. As long as there is some evidence to back it up.

I know that the importance of diet and its influence on gut health seems to be an element which is under closer and closer scrutiny as MS research advances. It would be so sweet to make a few changes to lifestyle and know that it was going to have a positive effect on our disease pathway. Who knows, this might even turn out to be the ideal way to stop MS in its tracks.

But although, not malicious, some things published online - not just on Facebook - can be, at the very least, irresponsible. By way of an example slightly closer to home, no one in my clinical MS team has heard anything about that seemingly-legit piece of research about plant-based diets and white blood cell counts. As always…

Let's be careful out there!