Now for the very good news. Since we now understand that PD is principally a problem with the Nervous System, it is entirely possible that we can pro-actively prevent further degeneration, and even regain what we've already lost, because Vagal Tone can always be improved, neurons regenerated, neural pathways re-written, and senses retrained
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Hope and Parkinson's Disease
Here is the book review for the new book on Parkinson's (search for "Lilian Sjoeberg" on your local amazon and the book should come up).
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Dopamine Breakdown and Parkinson's Disease: Part 2
In Part 1, we looked at how the MAO enzyme breaks down Dopamine in the brain and body, via what we termed the “MAO pathway”. In this part, we consider another pathway by which Dopamine is broken down, via another enzyme called Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT).
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Stuck on Pause with Parkinson's Disease
Indeed, I was recently contacted on this topic by Dave Faller, a person with a PD diagnosis, who has been exploring ways to help himself. Dave has written a very useful two page summary of Janice’s “Stuck on Pause” book and other work, and so I asked him if we could reproduce it here. He agreed, and hence the article below.
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Dopamine Breakdown and Parkinson's Disease: Part 1
In this follow up article, we will explore the various ways by which dopamine is chemically broken down, degraded, or metabolized. In doing so, we will provide yet another, more hopeful, story, that the reversible problem may be more to do with the breakdown of dopamine occurring too fast after it has been synthesized, rather than cells dying.
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Fright and Parkinson's Disease
In recently re-reading this excellent article, it struck me that, as part of their own literature review, the authors describe what it is like on the inside to be in the fright response, and hence according to my thesis, what is like to be symptomatic with PD.
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Sleep and Parkinson's Disease, Part 2
At that time, I had not quite perfected my routine or sleep quality. I am now doing quite well with it, and my sleep is much better than it has probably ever been. So in this second part, I will just do a show and tell about the things I ended up implementing that actually worked for me, in case this is helpful for anyone else to follow.
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Emotional Armouring and Parkinson's Disease
I am working with folks with movement disorders to explore the use of neurofeedback and photobiomodulation to aid them in their recovery. In this article, I cover my background, and how I arrived at these as a solution.
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Fascia Decompression and Parkinson's Disease
Lack of Oxygen to the Brain in Parkinson's Disease
If I had been seen by the neurologist only, then I simply would never have received the intensive physiotherapy for thoracic outlet - which did relieve the very worst of the pains, numbness and pins and needles sensations. However, I know from networking extensively with other people diagnosed with PD, many neurologists routinely discount injuries and body traumas as contributing factors and ascribe virtually all symptoms, including those more normally associated with nerve damage, to the Parkinson's.
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Constipation and Parkinson's Disease
I will cover below how I managed to resolve this for myself, and then we will look at the potential mechanisms of why constipation and PD symptoms are linked, I will first explain my self-observations which lead me to this conclusion.
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The Neck and Parkinson's Disease, Part 2
This is a follow on from previous articles on the subjects of the roles of lack of oxygen to the brain, the neck and breathing problems in Parkinson’s Disease. Here, we focus on the potentially profound role of special chemical sensors in our necks, which most people affected by PD will never have heard of, called “carotid bodies”.
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Reducing Stress and Parkinson's Disease
I have used three hours a day for three years (more than three thousand hours) searching the internet for videos and studies that could give me answers. When I made my small test experiment with people with different diseases, I found that I could help them all with stress reduction. Regardless of diagnosis, I could help them reduce symptoms.
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Thiamine and Parkinson's Disease
What was needed was for someone to gather and review all the research done on HDT for PD so far, collect all the anecdotes of what has and hasn’t worked for individuals with PD, and to resurrect as much of Dr C.'s knowledge, experiences and wisdom as possible. Then to pull it together and come up with a working plan or a guidebook for other people with PD to follow in order to try to optimize HDT the potential benefits of for themselves.
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Stress, Situations, Symptoms and Parkinson's Disease
It is in the nature of chronic diseases that symptoms manifest most when our survival instincts (fight, flight, freeze) take over our body's function. This is why the severity and range of symptoms can vary moment to moment, hour to hour, or day by day, according to how stressed or how relaxed we are in that moment, for most chronic diseases. Here, I use the word stress in its widest possible interpretation, to denote anything which may be troubling us in the present moment, e.g. feelings, accidents, trauma, troublesome relationships, financial problems, small unresolved situations from childhood, that may seem insignificant to an adult.
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Survival Instincts and Parkinson's Disease
To help shake off the gloom about this, I call our survival instincts our superpowers, because it is a more resourceful way to look at the body and the problems we might be experiencing. Try saying "thank you, body, for keeping me safe, but now it is time to bring me out of the safe survival state and back to the normal range of health and grow." This ought to give us a little more faith in the dispositions of our body.
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Feeling Trapped and Parkinson's Disease
As a first step, we perhaps need to identify the places where we are stuck in our lives, those stressors which come with a sense of being trapped, the stressful things we can’t fight or flee from, and try to address these. This is because the tonic immobilization framework of PD predicts that it will be very hard to reduce symptoms in circumstances that our nervous system is constantly feeling trapped by a proximate threat. Examples include being in a toxic relationship, living in a house with neurotoxic mould infestations, workplace exposure a chemical agent, enduring a long and stressful daily commute to work.
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Motivation, Pleasure, Pain and Parkinson's Disease
The activation of the habenula inhibits or deactivates the dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area, and, conversely excites or activates them when it is deactivated. This has profound implications for PD, as this points to the possibility that it is not cell death which causes the issues in PD, but chronic activation of the habenula permanently switching off the cells in the substantia nigra from producing dopamine. This is a more hopeful hypothesis, as it means the cells are just dormant, not dead. If we can figure out how to deactivate the habenula, this could provide significant symptom reduction.
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Dopamine and Parkinson's Disease
The Huberman Lab podcast is a lecture series by Prof. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, on practical and free tools for optimizing health based on the very latest neuroscience and human biology research. This podcast contains vital, actionable, and need-to-know information for people with Parkinson’s Disease, in particular of the latest pragmatic research into dopamine biochemistry. Dopamine is the major neuromodulator which is most problematic in PD, and the target for the mainstay medical interventions. So here I’ve extracted from the podcast episodes the timestamps of everything Prof. Huberman has to teach us on the subject of how to optimize our dopamine biochemistry. The format is the episode title, in order of release, followed by the corresponding timestamp links and descriptions whenever dopamine is referred to.
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Visual Cues and Parkinson's Disease
I learned about the connection between the eyes/vision and movement of the body in an online course run by my friend and "Wisdom Coach" Cheryl Townsley, where a tutorial showed how, looking up or down with the eyes (not via movement of the head) creates an immediate increase in the range of specific arm/shoulder motions. I could quickly check this was indeed true for myself. Indeed, the connection between eye and body movement is so important that professional athletes are being trained in these types of techniques, and are given specific eye exercises to improve sports performance!
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