Suck it up: A simulator of Multiple Sclerosis

The woman in the booth puts on headphones, and hears a woman’s voice and the sounds of everyday life. At the store, she opens her wallet and the screen suddenly goes blurry, from a Multiple Sclerosis attack that prevents her from distinguishing between her $20 bills and $1 bills. She tries to pick up a cup, but it falls out of her hand, with the drop simulating the sudden loss of coordination that MS can cause. Her fingertips vibrate and tingle insistently.

With a video, headphones, and two wobbly treadmill tracks, the machine mimics an MS attack. The RJO Group designed the simulator, which was funded by Biogen and Elan Pharmaceuticals.

Art Mellor, an MS patient who runs the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis, went through the simulator on Monday, at a conference of the American Academy of Neurology. “That’s what it’s like,” he said. MS patients often don’t have outwardly detectable symptoms and must depend on doctors believing their descriptions. Some patients, he said, get “the equivalent of ‘Suck it up,’ or ‘Oh come on, it’s not that bad.’”

The marketing theory behind the simulator: Doctors will be more empathic—and will treat the disease more aggressively – and that’s spelled m-o-r-e d-r-u-g-$.

Advice to MS patients and their advocates: Ask your neurologist if he or she has experienced the simulator, which is now touring conferences.

Read another MS story, or read Stephen Heuser’s source story in the May 2 issue of the Boston Globe.