I only know what I have observed in others and myself. I have never kept records on the people who came to me for help because that was not my place nor my right. Most came to the store and talked to me one and went on their way without ever contacting me again. I have never sought out any MS patients, but I have never turned one away who came to me and seemed to genuinely want my help. Some who live locally stayed in contact with me and I was able to keep up with their progress.

However, since the first printing of this book, hundreds of MS patients have contacted me. I am now in the process of sending out questionnaires to any patient interest in participating in a research project if we can establish one. Those deciding that they won’t or can’t follow the diet are just as important as those who will. If you are interested, you can write to me at the address later in this chapter.

Research of the type I have in mid would be difficult. Modern science wants a double blind study completed before anything is accepted. If you approach MS patients on the basis of “we have a possible way to reverse the disease through diet,” then how many are going to want to be part of the control? And even more so when you talk about supplements and placebos.

But somehow it apparently must be done that way because Dr. Swank has records on literally hundreds of patients who have done fantastically well on the diet alone. But the MS “powers that be” totally ignore this because it was not done as part of a double blind!

I have some ideas on how I would like to see a research program structured though, even if I can’t do it myself. Dr. Carlton Fredricks talked me into trying to get a PhD of my own in biochemistry because he said, I would never be satisfied with research done by someone else and maybe that’s true. But if someone were to incorporate the following steps into their research, I guess I’d have to accept it.

(1) A study to which all the volunteer patients are grouped by severity of disability and by the length of time since diagnosis. All patients to undergo complete allergy testing (food and environmental) as a part of the study.

(2) Groups of four patients as closely matched as possible, i.e., 4 males diagnosed for one year, with slight disability and able to walk and work: 4 females diagnosed 2 years, all of whom have difficulty with their balance; 4 males each diagnosed for 3 years and all using leg braces and canes, etc.

(3) All patients to get a full psychological work-up and to be given emotional stress testing and each foursome to be matched by psychological profile as well as by physical profile.

(4) All patients to be examined by the same physician and a standardized multiple choice evaluation scale used so all results could be computerized without interpretation.

(5) One member of each foursome to be assigned to each of four test groups. An unbiased third party should assign the patients and the examining physician should not be told which patient is in which group.

(6) Group One would not be given either the diet or the supplements; they would act as a control.

(7) Group Two would be given the diet only and be required to keep a journal of everything they eat and drink. That journal would be reviewed periodically and the patient instructed as necessary where he or she needs to make changes in his diet.

(8) Group Three would have the diet with the same requirements as Group Two, but also would get the supplements.

(9) Group Four would get the diet with the same instructions, but would be given placebos instead of supplements.

(10) The groups should be kept on their respective programs for at least two years. The number of patients in each group would have to be large enough to give meaningful statistics even after some patients drop out.

It has been my experience that many patients will not stay with the diet, even when they believe in it, because they simply lack the willpower. Of these, some swore to me that they really were following the diet, when I, in fact, observed them going into pizza parlors and taco stands near my health food stores. Sorry folks, but those kinds of foods are never compatible with the diet, not even “only once in a while.”

But I could not, nor do I think it would have been my right, to try to control those people’s progress or lack of it under the circumstances. But I can understand them. After all, at the TV station when I started the diet, I needed outside help to give me the strength to follow the diet without any cheating. It is so easy to convince yourself that a little cheating on he diet wouldn’t hurt and the cheating gets easier each time. These are the type of people I feel would be the biggest source of dropout in a research program of the sort I have outlined and why they should be monitored as closely as possible.

The best solution would be a controlled environment, such as a hospital clinic where they would have no access to the wrong foods. There are a number of places here in Florida where such a facility could be established. The problem would be the expense.

However, I’m afraid hat is an impossible dream. But such a research project structured along the lines I have outlined should, once and for all, settle whether the Swank Diet, or my supplement program along with the diet, is worthwhile or if others and I have just been lucky.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Q: Do I honestly believe the Swank Diet helped me overcome the physical problems of MS?

A: Yes, I believe it did. I have never had a new attack while following the diet.

Q: Did the supplement program help?

A: I’m sure it did, because my real progress in reversing the disease came after I had started it.

Q: Did being absolutely determined not to let the disease get the best of me, play a part in my recovery?

A: Positively, if you don’t believe you can win there is no sense playing the game. No one with a loser’s attitude has ever been a winner at anything.

Lets look at a few indisputable facts. In 1958 the Air Force put a free ankle leg brace on me. In 1963, they added a cane. In 1967, I was diagnosed by Dr. Swank and by the VA doctors as having MS. In 1970, I was re-diagnosed by VA doctors as having MS. Yet by 1971, I was symptom free. In 1972 and again in 1973 I had new attacks when I experimentally went off the diet and supplement program while I was a student at the university.

By 1974, following the diet and supplement program strictly again I was once more symptom-free and have remained so since. In 1982 and 1983 I was hospitalized in the VA hospital at Bay Pines in St. Petersburg, Florida because of a loss of Potassium from my system. I ended up in the cardiac unit. I spent almost a week with Potassium being fed directly into my veins before the levels came back to normal. The doctor treating me in 1982 could not believe I had MS because of my mobility. Although a cardiac specialist, he was familiar with MS because his sister had the same disease.

After my Potassium levels had returned to normal, he kept me in the hospital another week in order to try and disprove the MS finding in my records. He had me examined again by the Neurologist who found that I did indeed have classic MS neurological reactions, but had them under control.

During the 1983 incident the same cardiac doctor, finding no explanation for my body’s recurring loss of Potassium, had me examined by NMR, which revealed old lesions/scars in my brain stem. At the time at least one VA doctor theorized that an MS lesion in my brain near the site where the signal is sent from the brain to the kidney that excess Potassium must be dumped. It had caused a false signal to be sent to the kidney. His theory was that the false signal caused the excess excretion of Potassium. No other possible reason was given.

I went through a medical exam in 1986 for employment in he US Post Office and the physician there, after standard test found that I did have MS, but in remission.

In December 1988 on the 21st anniversary of my being diagnosed as having MS, I was again in Bay Pines VA Hospital. This time I had an MRI in addition to all the standard tests. The examining physician told me that I have enough MS plaques in my brain that I should possibly be comatose. Instead I’m basically symptom free.

The statistical chances have to be astronomical of being virtually unimpaired and requiring not medical treatment 21 years after an MS diagnosis. And even higher almost 31 years after unexplained physical problems possibly caused by MS began to appear that did require medical treatment at the time. All these findings agree that I am indeed an MS’er, however that is where the similarity between other multiple sclerosis patients and me end. So now it is time to look at the differences between others and myself.

The only obvious difference between others and me is the diet and supplement program I follow. There does not seem to be any other reasonable explanation for the difference in my physical health and others diagnosed with the same disease. Believe me, I have wracked my brain for other possibilities without success.

Because of my experience, I believe that most MS patients can overcome the disease at least to the degree that will allow them to live much more fruitful lives. They must first BELIEVE that they CAN get better. Then they must carry that belief into action and faithfully follow the diet program, seeking as much outside help as they need to bolster their willpower. As they see the first signs of reversal, they must come to KNOW that they WILL get even better and better as time goes by.

I honestly have no idea how many others have ever followed the program as I have outlined it for myself. I do know that some in the community has called me a charlatan. I have even been told that I never really had the disease and just used the whole thing as a ruse to make money in the health food business.

If that had been the case, I would have expected to make a lot more money than I ever did. Desperate people seeking help would have paid for my advice if I had asked. But no MS patient was ever charged any type of fee for talking with me. And most of the people I saw did not buy anything in my stores, nor did I ask them to.

As a matter of fact, I had a rule in place in all my stores during the time I was going to the university that no MS patient was allowed to buy anything in my stores. That was a strict rule designed to keep my suspicion of commercialism out of my hoped-for PhD program. Any employee violating that rule by selling anything to any MS patient knew it was grounds for immediate dismissal from employment.

No my struggle with MS was never a ruse to make money. But my hope to be able to help others to overcome their disease through my experience has many times been frustrating.

I remember being asked to address an MS society meeting far from here, several years ago. When I was introduced, a man in a wheelchair in the audience called out that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that the program didn’t work. As I approached the speakers’ rostrum, the wife of a deceased patient also called out that the program that I follow didn’t work.

Instead of the prepared remarks I was going to make, I asked both of them to join me at the front of the room. They answered my questions, I believe, honestly, if a bit defensively. It turned out that the patient who was there (eating a commercially fried donut in his wheelchair, I might add) admitted that he had only tried to follow the diet for about three months. He said he had not been able to afford the supplements I use, so he had never gotten all of he. But in his mind I was a fraud!

To my knowledge, I had never before even met this man. Someone had told him about me and more or less what I was doing for myself. Apparently he wasn’t all that interested though, because he couldn’t be bothered to come down the road the 24 or 25 miles to see me or even spend the 35 cents to call me long distance on the phone and find out first-hand what I was doing for myself. But he could make the effort and take the time to tell everyone he saw that I was, in effect, a charlatan. After all, he had gotten no results with my “magic” program after giving it what he thought was a fair trial period of 3 months.

The wife of the deceased patient said that her husband had been on the program for over two years with no results. When I asked her to describe their daily routine in food, she started with a breakfast of bacon and eggs. In her mind she had to keep up her husband’s strength and a good solid breakfast was one way to do it. He was of Italian extraction and loved his heavy meat sauce with cheese and pasta, so as a treat she fixed him something along that line every week. (But only once a week she assured me.) And since he didn’t like to swallow pills, he didn’t bother with the supplements every day! (But he did manage to get them down several times a week according to her.)

This woman honestly believed that she was helping her husband but she never had him on the diet at all! She never read Swank’s book nor did she ask me about the diet. How can any program help an MS patient if he won’t follow it? Once again the fault, at least in her mind, was my program, not their lack of dedication to her husband’s health.

Some of the MS patients I have seen remind me of the pictures of the man whose wife sued the tobacco company because he died of cancer or emphysema. I’m not sure which. The TV pictures, as I remember them, showed him smoking his cigarette while holding a pinched-off oxygen tube and coughing with every puff. His doctor was interviewed and said he had told the man to either stop smoking or he would die several years before he actually passed away. Yet, his wife tied up the court system trying to blame someone else for his death.

The real shame in people like these is that they have probably stopped several other MS patients with whom they came in contact from getting better by talking them out of ever trying to follow the program.

When an MS patient finds that he would rather have the worsening disease than follow the diet and supplement program strictly, I only wish he would not blame Dr. Swank or me. We are neither frauds, nor charlatans. Dr. Swank used his brain and scientific training to figure out a diet program. I used the information I got from various sources and my own body as an experimental lab to work out a supplement program that enhanced Dr. Swank’s diet. Then I had the stubborn determination to follow it all through. That’s all the “magic” there is to it.

If you have MS and would like to follow a program such as the one I have used successfully for the past 19 years, I will be glad to be of any assistance to you that I can. I am open to phone calls Thursday and Friday evenings between 8PM and 11PM Eastern Time and even letters. However, letters do have a way of being put off until tomorrow, so please don’t expect an immediate answer.

To contact me, write or call:

John Pageler
6200 102nd Terrace North
Pinellas Park, FL 33782
727-546-0994

How soon you might be able to join me on the tennis court, I won’t even hazard a guess. Sorry to say 9 out of 10 MS patients reading the book probably never will be able to join me. Some will never have the willpower to follow the program, others will let themselves be talked into either never trying the program at all, or being talked out of the program before it has a chance to start reversing the disease. It is sad how many well-meaning doctors, parents, or other relatives will provide the excuses patients need to just give up. And there is no denying that giving up is a great deal easier than sticking to the program. Especially when months turn into years of continuous self-denial of our favorite foods.

So I won’t even attempt to give a timetable. The program, or the patient, one or the other, is variable and unpredictable. All I can say is, those of us who follow the program for a long period of time, must do so for a reason. My reason is simple. I like to be able to play tennis whenever I feel like it. Without the program, I’m convinced I would never be able to take to the courts again.

To me, the real hero of my successful experience with MS is not any of the famous people whose suggestions became the supplement program, nor even Dr. Swank. Rather, my hero is a man whose name I don’t even know. He wrote my favorite children’s story. One with which I always identified when I was a little kid and that has always been an inspiration to me. It’s called, THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD.

If every MS patient would live his life with the attitude of, “I think I can, I think I can,” instead of like the little Red Hen running around and yelling, “The sky is falling,” they would (much sooner than they think) be able to join the little engine and me, laughing and saying, “I knew I could, I knew I could!”

Goodbye and Good luck.