Myla Goldman, MD, MSc, FAAN

Helping people with multiple sclerosis and complex neuro conditions live their best lives

For Myla Goldman, M.D., caring for people with multiple sclerosis is about much more than controlling a disease. The physician-patient relationship can span decades, built around helping people make decisions that allow them to keep moving forward with their lives.

“When you treat a person for decades, you sort of grow up together,” Goldman says. “If I’m able to help an individual live their best life, then they can go on to have an impact on others.”

Goldman is a neurologist and neuroimmunology specialist at VCU Health who focuses on multiple sclerosis and related disorders of the central nervous system. She is a professor of neurology at the VCU School of Medicine, interim chair of the neurology department, vice chair of faculty development and chief of the neuro-immunology division.

Multiple sclerosis is the most common condition Goldman sees, but she also cares for patients with less common and often complex neurological disorders, including neuromyelitis optica, myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG) antibody-associated disease, neurosarcoidosis and autoimmune encephalitis.

Many of these conditions have effective treatments. The challenge, Goldman says, is determining which treatment makes the most sense for the individual sitting in front of her.

“We know what treatments work well, which ones don’t, and we know how to keep the disease under control and at bay,” she says. “Knowing what drives people to make decisions helps me guide them in the decisions that are appropriate for them.”

That emphasis on shared decision-making has been central to Goldman’s practice throughout her career. She was drawn to MS care as new therapies were rapidly transforming the field and creating more choices for patients. Those advances also made subspecialty expertise increasingly important as physicians and patients weigh the effectiveness, safety, tolerability and long-term implications of different treatments.

Goldman earned a bachelor’s degree in behavioral neuroscience from Lehigh University and her medical degree from Rush Medical College in Chicago. She completed her neurology residency at the University of Virginia and a fellowship in clinical neuroimmunology at the Cleveland Clinic’s Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis Treatment and Research. During her fellowship, she also earned a master’s degree in clinical research from Case Western Reserve University.

Before coming to VCU in 2019, Goldman was a faculty member at the University of Virginia, where she directed the multiple sclerosis clinic and served as chief of the division of multiple sclerosis and neuroimmunology. She also helped develop fellowship training in MS and neuroimmunology, expanding opportunities to prepare physicians for a field that has become increasingly specialized.

Goldman brings a combination of clinical care, education and research to VCU. She saw an opportunity at the academic medical center not only to reach a larger population of patients but also to collaborate with VCU’s basic science researchers and strengthen connections between discoveries in the laboratory and treatments at the bedside.

“We have had a lot of success in making connections from the bench to the bedside,” she says.

Her research has focused on improving the way multiple sclerosis and its effects are measured and understood, including how walking ability and other measures of disability translate into patients’ everyday lives. Goldman has helped establish clinically meaningful benchmarks for commonly used MS walking assessments and has studied measures that can better capture disease progression and treatment outcomes in clinical trials.

That work reflects a broader question at the center of both her research and clinical practice: What does a change in disease actually mean for the person living with it?

Ultimately, Goldman wants effective treatment to allow MS to become a smaller part of a patient’s life — rather than the force that defines it.

“That allows us to help patients move forward and not have MS be a driving factor in their everyday life,” she says.