Take Charge and Develop an Attitude

One of the all time great books about life and the way we choose to live it is “The Road Less Travelled.” And so it is with Parkinson’s disease. Every person who wakes up with a twitching thumb, a feathery brush across one’s face, a tremble that wasn’t there yesterday, could be about to travel on a road less traveled and experience PD. And everyone knows that PD has no cure. At first, my expectations for travelling down this road were not great.

But my circuitous route to finding out that I had PD was sort of a blessing in disguise. By the time I was diagnosed, I was fed up with relying on conventional thinking to fix my problems. I knew that there was no one to show me what to do next. After three years of medical mismanagement by conventional wisdom, or as I preferred to think of it, bullshit, I wanted to take control of my health. Relying further on those who couldn’t diagnose a simple case of Parkinson’s was pure idiocy.

I’m in no way an expert in anything. But I have a keen sense of how things affect my body and a lack of respect for conventional “wisdom.” Being a runner for most of my adult life, completing a marathon and dozens of shorter road races, and training in New England weather which ranged from blizzards to 90 degree summer days, taught me to listen to my body and do what it was telling me. This led to me to absolutely believe that the best way for me to begin feeling better was to figure out what made me feel better and then do those things.  Fourteen years later I can report the philosophy is working.

The heart of this philosophy is believing in yourself and a desire to get better. Just as I learned that I could get into an MRI tube despite that this was 10,000 times harder than anything I ever did; it is mind over matter. Therefore, step number 1 is develop an attitude that you are in control of your body and your PD, and not the other way around. In order for my program to work, you must be in control because you will require your body to do things it doesn’t want to do. You will be surprised by what you can make your body do.

Remember the time in my early PD where my body was atrophied with dying nerve paths and withering muscles? Nobody told me what to do. Below is a recent photo of my physique after I made my body regrow my muscles in their entirety.

Exercise to combat Parkinson's Disease

Mind over matter.