George Jelinek

My mother was very incapacitated and died of MS in 1981. I was diagnosed with MS in 1999. I was determined that this was not going to be my fate. Fortunately, my career as a Professor in Emergency Medicine and background as Editor-in-Chief of a major medical journal gave me the tools to sort through the medical literature on MS. What I found startled me. With commitment to the right lifestyle changes, there is the real probability that many people with MS can live long, healthy lives relatively free of the usual problems associated with the illness.

For 25 years now, I have adhered to the lifestyle package I put together from the medical literature, described in my books. So have many other people around the world with MS. I remain free of further relapses or disease progression, as do many of the people who keep in contact with me. My mission now is to bring this evidence to a wider audience, working with the wonderful team at the UK-based international charity also called Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis (OMS). My most recent book, the Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis Handbook, edited with A/Prof Sandra Neate and A/Prof Michelle O'Donoghue, represents the distilled wisdom, experience and personal stories of around 50 people following the OMS Program world-wide.

In 2015 I founded and ran the Neuroepidemiology Unit (NEU) within the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at The University of Melbourne, Australia, now headed by Dr Jeanette Reece. For 3 years I was Specialty Chief Editor of Neuroepidemiology for the leading neurology journal Frontiers in Neurology, which ranked in the top 16% of the 192 best neurology journals in the world. The NEU’s charter is to investigate the modifiable lifestyle risk factors that predict the progression of MS with a view to refining a preventive medicine approach to management of the disease. We have published over 100 papers in major medical journals, confirming what I suspected back in 1999. I retired in 2019 but continue to work to bring the OMS message of hope to people with MS everywhere. Overcoming MS is possible!