A new surgical approach for treating multiple sclerosis (MS) not yet approved in Canada appears to be working for Yukoner Tim Cant, who returned home last week from India, where he underwent the procedure

"The operation was a tremendous success,” the 51-year-old said Tuesday from his home in Whitehorse.

"It's a crude way of saying it, but my plumbing's back in order.”

The plumbing Cant's talking about is the system of arteries that channel blood to the brain, and the jugular veins that circulate it back to the heart.

At a Bangalore hospital earlier this month, Cant went under the expert knife of Dr. Mohamed Rehan Sayeed. The surgeon performed something similar to angioplasty (inflating a small balloon to open up arteries in the heart) but on Cant's jugular veins.

While the medical community views MS as an autoimmune disease whose symptoms can be allayed with drugs, the "jugular angioplasty” Cant had is relatively simple surgery that treats MS as a vascular disease.

The surgery was pioneered three years ago by Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a professor of medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy. Dubbed the "liberation procedure”, the surgery is aimed at opening up veins in a patient's neck to allow proper blood flow from the brain.

Spurred on by his wife, whose health was rapidly deteriorating from MS, Zamboni's research led him to hypothesize that debilitating symptoms of the disease, such as loss of motor skills, numbness and extreme fatigue, are due to an excess of iron in the brain caused by impeded blood circulation.

So Zamboni conducted a series of ultrasounds on blood vessels to and from the brains of MS patients and discovered more than nine in 10, including his wife, suffered from varying degrees of blocked veins.

Following simple operations to unblock these veins in five dozen patients with relapsing MS, active brain lesions amongst the group dropped significantly, and more than 70 per cent suffered no further symptoms whatsoever.

And it is Zamboni's hypothesis and his clinical data to back it up that convinced Cant, who first learned of the Italian doctor's breakthroughs while watching the investigative journalism program W5 last November.

"I believed in what Dr. Zamboni said because of the evidence that he had, and now here I am fighting for my life,” Cant recalled. His neurologist had taken him off MS medication and the prospect of chemotherapy, touted as the final option, loomed, he added.

"So I went and got a second opinion and I got it in India ... because there's no question at this point, if there's a door open, I'm going to go through it pretty quick and it doesn't matter about the naysayers.”

These include MS societies in Canada and the United States that are not racing to embrace Dr. Zamboni's procedure. Doctors in both countries continue to do research on the matter, but until a significant body of corroborating evidence is produced, the surgery is unlikely to receive approval in Canada.

So Cant's friends and family helped raise the $25,000 necessary for the trip to India, and once Dr. Sayeed was secured, Cant and his wife, Mary Jane Jim, flew overseas.

During the surgery, Cant was fully awake and given no pain killers save for minor topical anesthetic to stave off pain felt at the needle's entry point.

"When they go into the base of your neck and start to inflate a vein, it has nerve endings on the sides,” explained Cant.

"So they need to know as they're blowing the vein up, how much pain there truly is.”

As he watched via closed-circuit television, Cant described the feeling of seeing blood gushing through his expanded veins as exciting.

He returned home with video footage of the procedure that he hopes could be of some assistance in Canada. He may return to India for a minor follow-up operation to insert a stent in his jugulars to hold them open.