Hi, and another welcome to the forum. I do hope you have landed in a good place that will give you the info and support you need without bombarding you with heavy-handed tactics. This is a good place.
I see your basic questions as these. You had really minimal symptoms 17 years ago and now have another pretty minimal symptom. You did get a neuro follow up and now have some more than impressive lesions. So, up to and including now you have had a "benign course" with your ms. Your neuro is recommending a DMD, Copaxone, but you are wondering if 1) Is it likely that you will continue to have really minor problems ?and 2) is it too late for the DMD to have any effect?
The first question is one that would have had a clearer answer a decade or so ago. Do you have Benign MS? Benign MS was a favorite diagnosis up until the last couple years. Most good docs (including yours, I gather) would now say that there is no such thing as Benign MS. A person can have a "benign course." But, no one can know until death if the course will "stay" benign the entire time. There are very good studies, looking at people with MS who were given the diagnosis of "Benign" and seeing how they were doing 2, 3 or 4 decades after diagnosis. A disturbing number of them (upwards of a third) were having significant cognitive problems or needing assistance to walk.
The best benchmark they have found is how the person is doing at 15 years after diagnosis. If the disease was still acting benignly then they were "likely" to continue with that pattern. There was still a percentage that would have the nasty part of MS rear its head and take them down. So, still no guarantees.
Most of us with any measure of disability would do anything to prevent further disability. It can be really awful.
I am worried by the spinal cord lesions you have. It seems that you don't have much in the way of symptoms from them, and this is lucky. Lesions in the cord and the brainstem can be the most disabling. I hope that you consider the appearance of lesions as evidence that the disease is advancing. It's just that the lesions haven't hit a big target yet. We all know that there is not a good correlation between symptoms and where the lesions are. Since your doc is urging you to begin Copaxone, then he clearly is concerned about the disease advancement.
There is an essay on the correlation between lesions and symptoms in our Health Pages:
http://www.medhelp.org/health_pages/Multiple%20Sclerosis/Lesions-vs-Symptoms/show/61?cid=36
The second question is whether the meds will help you? All the literature says they work better, the earlier you take them. That is true. The current DMDs affect the inflammatory (relapsing) part of the disease which occurs earliest in the disease. But, the term "earlier" is quite relative. Taking them now, 20 years into your disease IS early compared to taking them 40 years into the disease. And "now" is what you have. Will they be effective? The odds are that you will probably have some effect from them. Clearly you are still in the relapsing/inflammatory phase of your MS and that is what the Copaxone and others has its effect on.
So, I would say that the chance the med will help you is similar to the chance that it can help others who are still in the relapsing phase. Plus, you don't have a huge amount of disease to stabilize. Man, given those two things, and if you want the best chance of a future being able to play with your children and grandchildren, I would jump at the med.
It is true that no combination of supplements has been shown to actually change anything in MS except the way you feel. The arguments that they do are based on theory that goes like this. This supplement does this in the lab or is used for this kind of thing by native peoples. MS is one of those kinds of things that this should help. We have lots of stories of people improving with this supplement. Therefore, this is a good treatment.
If you had started a supplement program 17 years ago, and were without symptoms now, you would say it worked. But, the statistics show that as many people "without" taking that supplement program also remained without symptoms for 17 years. So were you just in a spontaneous remission (like the others) or were you well because of the supplements?
I have no problem with supplement regimes at all. I take several. But, I think it is important in a disease like MS, that can spontaneously go quiet, that we realize that the disease may not be responding to what we are doing. It may be following its own path.
There is actually good, hard evidence that the DMDs work to our benefit a good percentage of the time. My vote would be to do both. A caveat here is to be very careful with herbs and supplements that are know to have a "boosting" effect on the immune system. Our immune systems are already "boosted." They are so boosted they have begun attacking our own nerves. They are not weakened as so many people think.
So, the "odds" are in your favor, but what odds are you willing to play that you will be one of the very small percentage of people that escapes? You are in your mid-30's. You have another 50 years for this disease to have its way with you. That is a long time to defy the odds which get smaller and smaller as the decades pass.
Well, probably far more than you wanted to know. Sorry. I am a physician with MS and I sometimes go overboard with the info. But, I hope this helped some.
Welcome again! I hope you stay. We have a lot of great members - lots of support, experience and fun.
Quix