Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Part 5 Evidence Based Success The ketogenic diet has been used successfully—and safely—to treat medical conditions, particularly epilepsy, for more than a century. In the last decade, though, the therapeutic diet has found champions in the unlikely halls of Harvard’s medical school and beyond for its surprising effectiveness at treating mental disorders, from sc

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir : by Dave Bexfield This initial version of acknowledgements, a living document, features those who aided the writing, research, and production of the memoir. It will be expanded at a future date to better recognize aid received post publication and to properly and publicly thank those who made an outsized impact on the health of humanity. History will remember you. Craig, a longtime member of ActiveMSers.org, reached out to me as I was pennin

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield The concluding chapter of Sit Down Before Reading has been broken into five parts (1-5). Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Part 2 House of Horrors All of us have biases whether we admit them or not. I’m typically pretty openminded, but when people start crowing about things unsupported by the evidence, or worse, the science, eyebrows raise along with deep-seated biases. And nothing, nothing

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield The concluding chapter of Sit Down Before Reading has been broken into five parts (1-5). Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Part 3 Laying Siege Dating back to 3000 BC, one of the first recognized military tactics deployed by early civilizations was the now-classic siege. “A siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that cannot be easily taken by a quick assault, and which re

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield The concluding chapter of Sit Down Before Reading has been broken into five parts (1-5). Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Part 4 Fearless Two years ago, sitting across the desk from Dr. Deadpan, the veteran Lyme specialist from New York issued a final set of instructions at the conclusion of our 2-hour appointment. I was to take antibiotics to treat my Lyme disease, other medication to tre

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield The concluding chapter of Sit Down Before Reading has been broken into five parts (1-5). Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Part 1 a print of one of the first X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen, 1895; public domain Many of the world’s greatest medical discoveries were accidents, flukes, sheer luck. Penicillin, the pacemaker, the Pap smear, X-rays, insulin, the existence of allergies, Viagra, vaccinat

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield I can still recite the TJ Fannon Heating & Cooling-sponsored starting nine from memory. Eddie Bunn pitching, Luis Gonzales catching, his brother Riggo at third, John Schott at short, me at second, Andy (what’s his last name again?) at first. Patrolling the outfield: Jeff Persell, Buck Blackburn, and Joe Hamidi. The coach: Dad. He had the harebrained idea of assembling a ragtag baseball team of high schoolers in the twilight

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Disbelief. Incredulity. Skepticism. Extreme dubiousness. C’mon, a lone, renegade parasite responsible for all this carnage? That’s such a massive stretch that one trusted member of ActiveMSers, Sarah, the astrophysicist quoted in Chapter 37: Telltale SHARDs , finally cracked. Love your stuff, though I am worried you are going a bit too far with saying everything is Lyme.... I feel confirmation bias is afoot! I know that’s wh

Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield As a cub reporter for a freshly launched business newspaper, I was responsible for digging up scoops— think Woodward, Bernstein, Watergate. Then stop thinking that because it was 1994, I was barely in my mid-20s, and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where headlines like “Balloon Lands on Highway,” “Tumbleweeds Bury House,” and “Governor Signs Bill Recognizing Smell of Roasting Green Chiles as Official State Aroma” pull in

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield In 1993, Laura and I arrived on the shores of South Africa. We were among the students on the floating university Semester at Sea , and our visit to Cape Town was a fleeting four days. But in those four days, all of us felt determined to be world changers. Apartheid was in its final throes, and we were going to do whatever possible to accelerate its demise. And then, before we disembarked the ship, guest professor Charles Vi

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield When you get diagnosed with an incurable, chronic disease, it’s only natural to seek answers, to point fingers of blame, to hunt for the ultimate source of your illness. We all do it. Over the years, I’d replay the Fall of Dave in my head looking for clues. Why multiple sclerosis? Why me? Why now? In my search for a sliver of solace, I had narrowed the likely cause down to three. Was it my parents? In addition to my droopy b

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Demi Moore was just going to have to wait for me, I wrote in a 2016 blog post . In fact, I didn’t even know she was there, much less an arm’s length away, which was probably a very good thing. See, at the time, I was descending some extremely precarious steps at Machu Picchu… on my rear end, one slow butt scooch at a time. And Laura definitely did not want to hear my final words be a surprised celebrity-induced exclamation “

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield The mid-1970s were awash in memorable firsts for this writer. The first, and so far only, time that the Secret Service had to come to my rescue at the White House. (Even First Lady Betty Ford couldn’t assuage a sniffly second grader who, all alone and momless for the evening, cared not one lick about the special Christmas party being thrown for the children of diplomats.) My first official kiss, at least in my starry third-g

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Bexfield Twist /(beks-feeld) twist/ n. A wildly unanticipated turn of events or radical change of direction. 1. What happened next was so shocking it could only be described as a Bexfield Twist. 2. I was sure I knew what was coming, but then I got served a Bexfield Twist. 3. Trevor is dating Diane? That Bexfield Twist snuck up on me! The term originated in 2024 when 55-year-old health advocate and writer Dave Bexfield, with

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield I kept shaking my hands and stuffing them deeper into pockets, but they refused to warm. And strange, my fingers felt all pins and needles, numb. Yikes! They had also turned a ghastly shade of seasick white. But Laura and I were on land, and while it was a cool, wet day in the Colorado mountains, it was still late May in Silverton. We were there rooting on our good friend Lenny, who was participating in the popular Iron Hors

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield In third grade I kept a diary. For two days. (During the fall of 1976 I kept getting distracted by other more interesting endeavors, like riding my Big Wheel or teasing my sister Karen.) One of those two entries concerned the upcoming presidential election and the race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Living in Alexandria, VA, a short drive to the White House, meant that talk of politics was frequent in the households o

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Rob is a seasoned high school math teacher, an accomplished outdoorsman, and a talented chef. He’s also a world traveler, Peace Corps volunteer, and father of three. We should have never met—and certainly shouldn’t have become dear friends. But like with most of my friendships, luck, fate, and fat chance got together for a late-night poker game and dealt us hands that forged an unlikely bond. Laura and I were going out to a

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Taylor Swift at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards. 13 Sept 2023 (iHeartRadioCA,; Wikipedia) It started as a trickle. Then they arrived with regularity. Before long, the horror turned into an overwhelming deluge. Stories of likely misdiagnoses have since been broadsiding me with the frequency of unexpected new hit releases of Taylor Swift songs. Helen, diagnosed with MS in 2020, remembers her time living in Scotland and removin

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield My wife Laura is a brilliant scientist. Not kind of brilliant, brilliant-brilliant. And I know she is going to forcibly push back on this descriptor and hard—she also has a stupid level of modesty—but I’m the author of this memoir, and I’m putting my numb, weak, now newly swollen foot down. Her specialty is water, our planet’s most precious resource, and for the past 30 years she has worked side-by-side with some of the worl

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Days after I discovered I had Lyme disease and not multiple sclerosis, struggling to comprehend just how such an error could possibly have occurred, I had noticed the striking anomalies in the U.S. MS prevalence maps: the overwhelming tilt of cases being diagnosed in the far Northeast and upper Midwest, the heart of tick country. The more I observed, the more alarmed I became. Evidence of a lurking tickborne plague seeped in

Sit Down Before Reading: A Memoir by Dave Bexfield Lyme disease has been around since before mankind, and certainly before proverbs about bad apples, which first surfaced in the English language around 1340, conveniently around the time of Sir Lancelot and his ill-fated quest for the Holy Grail. And, fittingly, Guinevere’s “bad apple” stumper of a brainteaser. To complete the metaphor, as the fruit decays, these rotten apples produce ethylene gas, accelerating the aging of n