Judy Graham 1946-2025, MS self-help pioneer

We want to pay tribute to Judy Graham, a Multiple Sclerosis (MS) self-help pioneer and supporter of other disabled mothers, who passed away in October aged 78. (Photo credit: Family photo.)

She was a mainstream journalist, TV and radio producer and presenter who was diagnosed with MS at the age of 26 and had to change pace and direction. 

Against expectations, she went on to live with MS for more than 50 years, writing several books including Managing Multiple Sclerosis Naturally: A Self-help Guide to Living with MS.  She wrote for New Pathways, the MS UK newsletter she started and edited.  She was quick-witted and fast-talking but brief, and wrote in a similar style that didn’t waste words.  She was in touch with many readers, who have great affection for her and the difference she made to their lives at a difficult time. 

After her death, we’re finding out just how many people with MS she reached and encouraged, here and internationally, including in the US,  Canada and the Netherlands.  Her approach, promoting nutrition and gentle therapy, broke away from despair, the bleak future passed on to newly-diagnosed people by doctors, or reliance on pharmaceutical companies, who are driven by profit and hide the harm they cause, or charge unaffordable prices for drugs that are effective. She investigated and tried both alternative therapies and experimental medical procedures. 

She had a baby at the age of 38.  Her 1999 book, Multiple Sclerosis and Having a Baby: Everything You Need to Know about Conception, Pregnancy, and Parenthood encouraged many women like her to start a family despite their fears and the obstacles.  She made practical suggestions for how to manage, allowing for your level of health and disability.

In 2006, she was on “You and Yours” BBC Radio 4 in a discussion sparked by the huge cost to the NHS of the drug Beta Interferon, which some NHS trusts were refusing to pay for MS patients.  She highlighted that research was not being done into alternative treatments which she and other people with MS were finding helpful (as doing this isn’t profitable). She was asking for research into stem cell therapy, which she went abroad to try.  At that time, it was done by taking the patient’s own cells, a very individual procedure, not anything they could duplicate for a big group of patients, so again it wasn’t profitable on a large scale.

She was interviewed in the Canadian documentary, Living Proof (2017), in which Matt Embry of MS Hope promotes a special diet.  It tells the story of how they resisted the hostility against them by the MS Society of Canada, which was sponsored by Big Pharma.

After managing to live independently for decades with support at home, she wrote this account of having to go into a care home earlier this year.

She is survived by her son, grandchildren and sister.