Suffering from MS? Learn how Bob Cafaro completely healed Multiple Sclerosis on his own!

Hello, good morning friends, welcome to our power is within the podcast. I'm your host, Chad Smith, and my mission for this podcast is to inspire people to take back their power and realize that you are the healer they've been looking for all along. This week's challenge will be to play simple, yes all you have to do is think of something you like to do just for fun and then set aside some time this week to do it and of course have fun doing it because that's what the game is about alright this week's guest guys i'm so excited to share with you today's episode bob

cafaro

he's going to share a wonderfully inspiring story with us today i had the best time chatting with him , it's just amazing. human, he's an inspiration in so many ways and he has this, really, I don't know, this incredible energy, you'll hear it in just a minute, like his voice, his energy, the way he expresses himself, it's an honest pleasure and I.

I had a great time chatting with him and literally hearing his story of how he overcame severe

multiple

sclerosis

, often known as MS, is so inspiring as he tells us all about his story, what he is doing these days and how he is doing. now. maintains your health and well-being and yes, it is quite powerful, our bodies are absolute and amazing gifts when given the right environment to heal and Bob is a testament to that today, I think you guys are going to love this story and I'm just going a to jump right into this and introduce bob to the show, thank you so much bob for being here today with me and everyone who will be tuning in to listen to my pleasure chess, thank you for the invite, absolutely yes, I'm very excited to host it. to hear more and

learn

more about you and your story and what you've been through and what you've overcome so honestly, I'd like to start by opening the floor for you to share a little bit about your story. and just what you've been through and give us a quick summary of what you've been through, what you've been through, what you know in your recovery and healing journey and where you are today.

Well, I think that may be the best. To go back a little bit chronologically speaking and come back to this it would have been December 1998. I experienced the first symptoms which were obviously unknown to me at the time, but it was numbness in my right leg. I started, the numbness got worse. and I started limping and at one point my right leg collapsed under me and I almost fell and at that point I saw a specialist, an orthopedic surgeon, and he assumed it was just a pinched nerve, there was nothing to worry about and then my My GP saw it and I started reading in the Mayo Health Clinic book about these symptoms and they said it was possible.

I asked him if it could be. He says no. My wife has. Definitely not. It was great and somehow the numbness in my legs subsided and seemed to go back to normal and then two months later in February 1999 I started losing peripheral vision in my left eye which is optic neuritis which I had never had before. experienced and that I hope people never experience. It's when your fields of vision actually start to disappear from view and you lose peripheral vision in some places, so at that point I tried to get an appointment with a neurologist and they were all booked.

After a week I was able to see a neurosurgeon and I could tell by the way he looked at me. it was him who thought he was ms, although he didn't say that he sent me to the first neurologist i had ever seen, so here we are in february 1999. i waited a week before seeing this guy and he did. an mri on my brain was clean there were no lesions and he said you have ms and this was for me a death sentence because i am a cellist i play the cello in the philadelphia orchestra since 1985 and my only knowledge of ms is the great british cellist Jacqueline Dupre who stopped playing at the age of 25 due to MS and died from complications of the disease at age 42. so being told i have ms was basically a death sentence for me and i remember when he said he just couldn't believe it and i left the office thinking this guy was crazy because he didn't have brain injuries.

He is an epilepsy specialist so it is a misdiagnosis so I contacted my brother in law who worked for nih at the time the national institutes of health and he said don't be scared by a first opinion and set up an appointment with uh he contacted what was his name at the time henry mcfarland, who was the head of ms at the institute national institutes of health made an appointment with dr. fred lublin, considered one of the top three specialists in the country, and he was at hahnemann hospital in philadelphia and now he's director of ms at mount sinai, new york, so i saw fred lublin and he had some questions and he sent me to a rheumatologist and I went through a series of tests proven everything, heavy metal toxicity, helps Lyme disease, do you think about it?

They did tests on me. I was tested for every rheumatoid disease in the book. well, and he thought it might have been vasculitis, and the only other thing i've seen about it was in dr. roy swank, the ms diet book, which at the time was really one of the only books available that I knew of and I had These unexplained blisters on my toes and Dr. Swank references that in his book which is one of the symptoms, but Fred Lublin thought this was a sign of vasculitis. He sends me to a rheumatologist. Every rheumatoid disease is negative.

I return to Fred Lublin. and he says you have ms this is a definite case and i keep bugging him how sure are you he says well im 95 percent sure you have ms so i still didn't want to believe this. To this, I hope this is somehow a misdiagnosis and I am in that small percentage of people who are misdiagnosed, so here we go. He starts me on Avenex and also sends me to a neuro-ophthalmologist at Will's Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. Robert Sergot, who is now chief of neuro-ophthalmology at the hospital, is very prominent and very skilled, very respected, and he started me on Avenex, which is the intramuscular injection of interferon, so I asked Fred Lublin.

Do you know what it is? Basically, you know what the risk is in taking this. There is absolutely no risk to medication assistance and you have to take it, so I start taking this medication and it is absolutely brutal for anyone who has taken this medication. You inject the medication the night before, you have to take ibuprofen basically to counteract the effects of the medication and then the next day you have a case of the flu so bad that your hair hurts, so you do this once a week and it was horrible, so let's move on, um, the vision, I'll ask you a question, go ahead please, okay?

Um, at this point, after all this, you know trial and error, you go to the doctor and they do all these tests and you still want to believe that you really weren't. um, you know you didn't have ms, right? I'm still only dealing with the two symptoms you mentioned at the time because you said the numbness got better but then you had the peripheral vision problems and then the blisters on your feet but was that all or were you starting to progress so here ? Come on, so the blisters on my feet had subsided, they left minor scars for a while.

The vision in my left eye never recovered to this day, so I lost some peripheral vision in the left eye, so I went ahead and was on this quest. proves that I had been misdiagnosed and I started working out like a fiend you know, and I'm proving that I'm basically different than the vision in my left eye, I'm asymptomatic at this point and that's summer, start moving on please , I'm sorry. I just wanted to know why they felt so sure you had MS when you had virtually no symptoms and no lesions. Oh, okay, so I forgot to say two things, so let's go back to February 1999.

This is Robert Sperling, he was the neuro, the first neurologist I saw even though I had no injuries, he said that when you have numbness in one leg and loss of peripheral vision in one eye, that's a textbook case of MS that I didn't want to believe, so I went to Fred Lublin and I was one of the colleagues at his practice, and she touched my neck and said, I think Your problems come from your neck and I had an MRI on my neck and three small lesions appeared on my spinal cord, so at that time I forgot to tell you this.

So at that time, Fred Lublin considered this to be a definitive case of MS, so everything else ruled out three spinal cord injuries, so that's when I pestered him about the definitive diagnosis and he said he was 95 percent sure he understood it. okay that sounds good thanks I couldn't reveal that so that makes more sense thanks here we go I'm asymptomatic and now the summer of 1999 comes and I'm on this quest to prove that I was misdiagnosed. I'm Iron Man. I'm doing these 30-mile bike rides in a brutal heat wave in upstate New York and it's 95 degrees and I'm with these guys doing 30-mile bike rides, which, in retrospect, is a reckless move to say the least is all I suddenly start losing peripheral vision in my right eye so this is scary because the left eye never fully recovered so I'm in upstate New York teaching in a summer music festival.

I came home, went to see Dr. Robert Sergat and he put me on IV steroids for the second time, so I didn't reveal this either. In February 1999, I took three days of IV steroids, meaning a thousand milligrams of methyl prednisolone dripped into my veins for three days, so I started another three-day course of IV steroids. followed by uh, you know, oral steroids, when you basically leave them on oral steroids, starting with 100 milligrams of prednisone and tapering down to 10. So things stabilized for about a week and then I started getting a stomach virus. and I started vomiting and you know a stomach virus goes away in a day or two, this one didn't go away, it stayed and I was approaching six seven days, now I'm vomiting and I can't keep any food down. or water and I end up hospitalized for severe dehydration so I'm in the hospital for four days and they can't do anything for me and I'm on avenix this whole time so they finally give me anti-sickness medication. leaving the hospital I'm so bad I can't move my hands I mean I can't even hold the phone I can't feel anything with my hands both eyes are so bad I'm legally blind I can see silhouettes of people and that's it I can barely walk , I'm incontinent, I can't hold my urine, I can't feel when I have to poop, I mean, everything is gone, my body feels like it's getting electric current, it's horrible, so right now.

At that time I went to see, I'm trying to contact Fred Lublin and I don't realize that he is in the process of moving to New York, so he contacted me after three days and I couldn't even get in to see. him, so I managed to get a new appointment with a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Clyde Markowitz, a highly esteemed neurologist, so I go to see Clyde Markowitz and I'm basically in a wheelchair. Now it's so bad that he's doing an MRI of my brain and spine. spinal cord and I have over 50 lesions in my brain and my spinal cord has a lesion that is three and a half centimeters long and takes up the entire spinal cord, so wow, this was sometimes in a very short period of time, yes, this is the first time.

Well, this is August 1999. Now you're talking about six seven months total. Yes, you went from three very small lesions in your spinal cord to more than 50 in your brain. You didn't take medication all the time. time, yeah, wow, so he did an MRI and he saw this and he put me on IV steroids for 10 days, which is a thousand milligrams of breast methylprednisone followed by six weeks of oral steroids and you know, I start experiencing all these immunosuppressive complications, Hey. whatever, you know, bad nightmares, you know, I have this bad infection in my left elbow that comes out of nowhere, you know, and at this point I go to see Robert Surgot again at the eye hospital at Will's and I sit down and he gives a basic vision test i can't even see the biggest letters on the chart and then he gives me a visual field test, you know where you hold the clicker in your hand and you click every time you see a flash of light in the periphery and I You sit there, with a poker face, without clicking even once because I can't see anything, stops the test and says, okay, says I'll write you a note for permanent disability and you know you're talking about a sentence of death.

Do you know that in eight months I will no longer be the successful cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and someone will be permanently disabled for the rest of my life? And are you still playing at the time that during those eight months or not I was? Playing until a few weeks before, but now you know my hands were so shot that it tells me I'm going to write, you know, for permanent disability and this was like, you know, I write this in my book, I say this is like, you know To Ebenezer Scrooge you willwhatever I propose because you know what the neurologist said, you did the impossible and you know it's very powerful for him to say that correctly.

I do believe in that sense, you know, unfortunately, yes, I'm mortal, I'm going to die at some point, but you know, hopefully, I know, I'm sure I'll be one of the centenarians. I mentioned you had children, did you notice any changes in your relationships through this experience? Yeah, there was a whoa, there was, anyway, so I went through a pretty contentious divorce when I got sick and you know, they say an illness can make a marriage. stronger, it can destroy it, you know, in my case it destroyed it and it cost me a lot, you know, collateral damage, you know my relationship with my daughter and, you know, my son who I have a good relationship with now.

After years and years of trying to rebuild that, I hope that one day I can have a good relationship with my daughter too. I got you, so yeah, it sounds like you're on the right track for that, I hope so, um, and then what happens? Well, I guess what would you say to someone who says there's someone out there and they find this episode because they have ms um and they're listening to this, but maybe even a doctor has already told them because, unfortunately, sometimes you get doctors who tell us things that really get into our heads and become our story, let's say that they have already been told that their MS is too advanced and that they have no hope, there is no possibility of Repair if they are trapped in that story of mine, It's a shame, my injuries are too big and they're in that desperate state, what advice would you give them?

Well, again, you know, I think it's important to understand that I'm not a doctor, I have no medical experience, I have no medical training, I have no experience in science, biology, pharmacology, you know, fitness, nutrition, anything, but you know, MS. It affects everyone differently and Dr. Terry Wallace thinks I was lucky not to have it. I have eight years of this in my system. I had eight months before I aggressively started making every possible change to my lifestyle, my diet, everything, so she thinks it was a huge advantage for me, but you. I know that a healthy lifestyle will benefit everyone. , regardless of your health status, and you know I'm going to look at it this way: the medications we have for the disease have no cure and all medications can work now.

The progression is slow so I would say you know you have nothing to lose if you try everything you can, as far as you know, leave no stone unturned, as far as you know, diet, exercise, hydration, mindset, meditation, you know These things, everything you know. the culmination of all those things will produce benefits for everyone, yes I agree, you have nothing to lose if a doctor has already told you that everything will go downhill from here, so why not do everything you can to take back your power and see? What is posible? It's true, they told me exactly that and I said no, you know, and you know, God gave you a middle finger, it's time to use it, yeah, I like that, this is not necessarily related to ms or healing, but It may be, but If you only had one, if you were told you could only share one message with everyone for the rest of your life, what message would you want to share?

I would, my message would be to cancel your membership in our toxic society. as far as diet, you know, it would be like um, I would say that, as far as your knowledge goes, everything that we have, let's say, GMOs, you know, genetically modified organisms in our foods, you know, pesticides, all of these things, I would say vote with your wallet, cancel your membership. you know, it shows that, you know there is a need for a healthy lifestyle, it's funny because even big box stores like Costco now have this amazing variety of organic foods because people want them and that's a sign that people are becoming becoming smarter.

They're voting with their wallets Yes, yes, I love it. Thanks, do you have any other ideas or just thoughts or tips that you'd like to share based on your own personal experience with anyone listening, whether you know what they are? passing by yes I think that uh you know that we are all capable of being one of those people who achieved the impossible you know and it is curious that having heard Nando's speech stopped you know that he said that he is not an extraordinary human being in no way does that mean that he said that He just refused to die and he never thought he had the ability to do something like what he did and I think you know that we are all capable of doing incredible things if we set our minds to it, yes, yes.

The whole time you were telling the story about him, all I could sit there and think was: wow, he had the will to live like that, he made a decision and he really had the will to live, oh yeah, sometimes we need that. Can you tell us a little about your book and how people can find it and also connect with you? Well, I wrote the book and I'm very proud of it. I never thought he would write a book, but I never had anything like that. this to write about my website bob

cafaro

.com and you can order a signed print copy directly from me and I will send it to you or you can download the book on amazon kindle and that is fine on the website on the home page and I also did a talk from ted and that's on the home page of my website too, that's probably where you found me, right?

Chaz, yeah, yeah, actually I think I found you on YouTube originally, okay, and you also know that I've helped people in one-on-one consultations that I know in person and on video and I've had a lot of success helping people that have nowhere to turn. and it's not just people with MS, but also people with other diseases. that you know western medicine and doctors, you know that they can't really help them and you know that's, you know, that's something, it's time to help yourself, you know that and it's funny that robert sergat, the neural ophthalmologist from the wills eye hospital, he said you know he said we are very limited with what we can do for people with MS and you know I have a saying of my own that says: you know doctors in medicine are limited but you have no limits, that's a good saying , if you think about that like the human spirit has no limits like you're capable of anything I love so much that's beautiful um you're and you're on YouTube are you on any social media uh yeah, I took a break because I was taking I dedicate about three hours a day, you know, editing videos, you know, making newsletters, you know, answering emails, answering comments, it really took up about three hours a day and you know this is not my profession, I don't have one. a team to help me here and it was really a big help in playing cello and piano too.

You know, I like to practice the cello. I like to practice the piano for an hour a day and you know all this stuff was falling out. On the way with social media so I'll get back to it although I need to strike a balance where I can use social media but not let it take over my life so I will when you find that balance let me know yeah , and so should it. Tell people I was greedy. It hit me in January and I made a full recovery in two and a half days. And on the fourth day I biked 10 miles.

I worked with weights again. I did all yoga. So, wow, you know what you just got. You've got yourself in a really good place, my immune system and I also take vitamin D3 because my wife runs a study for hospital workers and now she works for a functional medicine doctor and she loves it so that's how it would be. The only thing I take is vitamin D3. I don't take any medication. Yes, it is a good supplement, especially in areas where there is not enough sunlight. Yes, in all seasons of the year and I think that makes a big difference when it hits you. covid and it's not if it's when covid hits you because I think we'll all do fine yeah now it makes sense okay last question and then I'll let you go but if anyone here is listening and asks where do I start where would you say that, of all the things that we've talked about, where would you say is maybe the first place that you would encourage someone to get started or maybe the first place that you tell them to use it as a resource?

I would, my book is helpful because I detail everything I did with my diet and a lot of trial and error so you can

learn

from my mistakes, not yours, and I would say the first thing is to basically reevaluate your entire diet and hydration. You know I would eliminate anything that the human body is not meant to ingest and basically follow a low calorie hunter-gatherer diet and to me that's the first place I would start well and of course I would also read your book and I'll put the links in the show notes so people have easy access.

Check it out, yeah, and you know, if anyone wants to contact me, they can do it through the website or directly at bobcaffarollc gmail.com. Impressive, thank you very much. So much bob, I really appreciate you connecting with me today and sharing your story with everyone who will listen and I hope that we can send this continued message of inspiration and empowerment and the idea that healing is possible. A great chess. Thank you so much for reaching out for the invitation and I can't tell you how grateful I am and I wish you all good health, okay thank you all, that's how amazing Bob's story is, am I right?

Guys, our bodies are so amazing. and every day I feel more and more inspired by different stories of what is possible from many perspectives. Bob's story is a miracle, but for those of us who understand the intelligence of our bodies, we know that we are capable of performing miracles every day and Honestly, I believe that our body is just a big giant miracle in itself, if we really They think about it, I really hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you share it with a friend and on your social media, because who doesn't? I want to hear a story like this, so let's spread the word and let more people in the world know what is possible.

Also, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and a quick review on Apple Podcast if you enjoyed these episodes, and as always. There is a link at the bottom of the show notes to the virtual tip jar. If you want to support future episodes, go ahead and play now, have a lot of fun, and until next time, make this week a great one.