you can't spell sclerotic without erotic

ever wondered what the sclerosis in multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--aka lou gehrig's disease--stands for? well, i always have, and i've also always wondered why it's not multiple scleroses. after all, it's not called the march of dimis, right? har

anyway, here is my newfound understanding of sclerosis. the term is not derived from any neuroanatomy per se but rather from the word sclera, also known as the white of your eye. if you've ever poked at your eye with your finger as i do every morning to put in my contacts, you know that your eyeball is firm and springy, as if it were covered in taut rubber. in sclerotic diseases, the body responds with a process called reactive astrocytosis. this is, in essence, scar formation in the nervous system, analogous to the shiny, tough scars that form on your skin after a cut heals. like superficial scars, these nervous glial scars were found on autopsy to be much firmer than average nervous tissue, and thus the name sclerosis was born. in multiple sclerosis, for example, the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking the body's own nerve cells, resulting in sclerotic lesions that eventually clog up the nervous system. the image i always think of is wolverine plunging the syringe full of liquid adamantium into lady deathstrike, thereby filling her circulatory system with metal. beautiful, i know.