Music therapy, runner's high, endorphins, acting drunk and tricking the brain: my theory

I don’t pretend to know much about music therapy. In truth, I don’t know anything about it. What I do know is that for some reason, the right music and exercise will combine and soon my body cannot resist acting pretty normal. All I have to do is move to certain driving music and exercise aggressively and the music takes my body into a zone and it does things I can’t otherwise make it do. That includes eliminating or reducing those symptoms that would bother me daily including stiffness and out-of-synch coordination. These symptoms will manifest into slight staggering., stubbing my feet while walking, and a loss of energy from fighting my body. If I wasn’t on the receiving end, I would think I was drunk. But it is I, and I’m not drunk. Thank God I have my music therapy to save me from that image. (Most of the time) Ha!

I think I may have figured this whole thing out.  It may stem back from when I was a long distance runner training for a marathon and I would go on 1 or 2 hour runs and listen to music to help with boredom. During these runs, I would almost always get what is widely known as a runner’s high, sort of a zone where I would run for long periods just to get that “high” feeling. I think it was caused by the brain generating endorphins or something like that.

So the combination of memories of my runner’s high from years ago and today’s music and PD exercise may trick my brain into thinking that my PD exercising and music is giving me the runner’s high that I once needed and received from running. Another term for that dependency is called addiction. Hell, maybe I have a few endorphins left over that come to life when they hear my music.

So that’s my theory. I haven’t seen or heard from any other runners who have Parkinson's and have had this experience, but I do wonder if my thirty plus years of running are still paying benefits by helping control symptoms. And even if they do not, I’m going to believe they do because it works for me. Don’t judge. I’m not paying attention anyway.

I tried to show you a video on some of the exercise intensity achieved when I get into my music therapy zone; unfortunately  I'm not very proficient in producing videos. Getting creative in video apparently is not a side benefit from PD as still photography seems to be. So instead of the exercise video, I will show you one of my

NYC Skyring

NYUrbanimages.com, photos. Does anyone want to volunteer helping me to produce my videos?

I didn't think so.

Next blog may cover more about my improved photographs and why my doctor and I believe it is a result and side benefit of :Parkinson's. 

Music,Exercise and Bouncing Ball Combine to Eliminate Parkinson's Symptoms

Some days I will get a clunky feeling, often first thing in the morning, that my body wants to do something other than what I want it to do. Another way to describe it might be, if my body were a puzzle, someone just knocked the completed puzzle off the table and all the previously in place pieces are now scattered. The body is fighting every attempt to walk, to move my arms , hands, neck, etc. I can still do anything I try, I just move slower and have to try harder. This takes more energy and unless I fix it, I will be exhausted in no time. I like to think of this as PD kidnapping my body and daring me to come and get it back.

PD is no challenge for me in fixing this symptom. I win every time. So here is the fix. I stumbled on music therapy the hard way. When I began a regular daily exercise of walking and stationary biking, to help with the boredom and make the time go by as I went through my  aerobic routine, I tried listening to loud, rhythmic, upbeat music and noticed how remarkably fast my reluctant body fell in line and did exactly what I wanted as soon as I asked. Immediately! It was as though somebody put all the pieces to the dropped puzzle back in place in one or two seconds. It’s best if you can walk (or stationary bicycle or stairs, or anything) to the beat, but not essential for me. Using music therapy I am now able to  make this PD symptom go away like its afraid of me. (It should me. I’m one tough MF.) Or maybe it’s the music. I rather think it’s me being tough. You gotta problem with that? Seriously, until PD decided to make a home for itself in my body, I never had the extreme passion for music that takes over by muscles and chases PD the hell out. Music is the most pwerful drug I take for eliminating Parkinson’s symptoms because it drives me to exercise with an intensity that I could not otherwise achieve. Believe me when I tell you this. The intensity of my workout would be a fraction of what I can do with loud, driving upbeat tunes. Right now I am listening and exercising to Imagine Dragons, Talking Heads, some hard Dylan and Nelly. I use Spotify’s paid service because for $10 or so dollars a month, I get to listen to virtually every tune recorded that I have even a remote interest in.

I came across someone else’s solution for fixing the dropped puzzle feeling. They use a bouncing ball; I tried it and it works every time, but it's not effective in infusing extreme intensity into my workout like music. It is a quick fix for adjusting your discombobulated  and uncooperating muscles. I use a nice bouncy racket ball (the ultra-blue Penn ball) and a flat hard surface and bounce the ball from my left hand to right hand, over and over, while standing. By the time I hit 50 or 60 bounces, less than two minutes, the body has been taken back from Parkinson’s Disease, I thumb my nose it’s way and get on with my day.

Try it. See if it works. If not, try a variation that might work for you. Good luck.

 Or if you  know of someone who can benefit from this very simple symptom fixer, please send the link. They will thank you (if they are polite).

The two videos show me practicing what I’m preaching.. 

ResistingPD.blogspot

Along With Parkinson's Came New Writing, Photography and Music Passion and Abilities

Okay. Enough preaching. I promise to get back to basics with the blog and write about how Parkinson’s disease affected me, negatively and positively. I would say that the early four or five years were the most annoying, if only because it was all new to me and I had not yet had enough experience. (Neither did my doctors.) My early symptoms were mainly stiffness when walking, a lack of hand dexterity resulting in problems with typing, shaving, brushing my teeth and doing buttons. And my handwriting was very small. Typical PD symptoms and not terrible. Then there was that wasting away of muscle which to me was most depressing. One symptom that I have never had and still don’t is the rhythmic tremor. I occasionally have a shakiness when doing something delicate like holding a soup spoon. But one of my early doctors put me on propranolol and the shakiness was under control. It still is. This is probably not a Parkinson's disease symptom, oddly enough. (To prove my steadiness, recently at a New York City gun range, I shot at moving targets and did at least as well as a number of younger people who do not have PD. Just sayin…) I will show you how I beat every one of my symptoms later.

But read on about some strange, unexpected possible positive affects of PD.

Early in my PD history, I noticed changes in my interests and the quality in my work in these interests. First was writing fiction. Prior to this onset of PD, I had little interest in, and never tried to write, fiction, and suddenly I found myself writing a novel and numerous short stories. A couple of these were published. Let me  restate this. Along with PD came a sudden ability to write fiction at a quality level that was recognized by others who selected my work for publication. Was this a silver lining to the changes in my brain? Was it a response to the complex cocktail of drugs aimed at making my brain connect better? This is a question for people a lot smarter than me. I can only report that this was a sudden and dramatic change for me happening at exactly the same time as other changes due to PD.

In future installments, I will also discuss the amazing improvement in my photography and interest in music related to my Parkinson’s. Both became obsessions beyond what I could ever describe. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Another sample of my photography is above. Enjoy.

NYUrbanimages.com

Exercise. Get Started. Do It Now.

This blog is about my personal successful experience, found through trial and error over 14 years of resisting Parkinson’s with a single minded determination to live a normal life, and not one dictated by some wimp ass disease.  I will show you what works and what has not. It’s possible that no one else knows about my llst of things that work. Possible but not likely. It would be more likely that a cure for PD has been discovered on an isolated mountain top in Tibet .  This is not a medical blog or a how to, but when I can insert some common sense discussion, I will. Some things are just too important to ignore.

So how did I tap into my bad attitude?

For me, it helps to humanize, or maybe it’s demonize, the enemy. If you have Parkinson’s, then you already know the enemy. It’s that thing that makes you feel like you have a terrible hangover every morning when you wake up. And you haven’t had a drink in a week. (Opportunity for a “good news, bad news” joke.)  The bad news is with Parkinson’s, you always wake up with a hangover. The good news is that with Parkinson’s you will wake up. (As opposed to diseases that will put you to sleep permanently.) Please allow my morbid humor as bad as it is. Thank you.

What we need to do now is get motivated to begin to resist PD. Motivation is what you get when you combine attitude with a pressing need for action and a belief that the action will help. My plan is to convince anyone who has PD and interest that there is a way to make life better, more enjoyable, less frustrating and less painful by taking from what I learned in 14 years of trial and error of resisting PD and holding that demon at  bay or even beating it back by reversing symptoms. I hope that the list of symptoms eliminated or reduced will motivate someone to action. I’m not saying that if you do what I did, your symptoms will react the same way. This is unlikely since most people with PD do not share all symptoms. At least I don’t think so. I never did a survey.

First, and, to me, most important was rebuilding my muscles after my right side was reduced in size and strength by 50 percent in my estimation.  I already mentioned that. I hope to address the specifics of the exercise program as soon as I clear it with one or two personal trainers, even though I did not use a personal trainer. I simply do not want provide this type of information that could be inappropriate for some people, especially if someone is older and has no experience with intense physical activity. I do not want to be responsible for your heart attack.

Keep in mind that I have had a very active physical life starting before high school, continuing through college, then right through my entire adult life. My greatest physical achievement was when I was 35 and ran a full 26.2 mile marathon in Newport Rhode Island in 4 hours, 11 minutes and 50 seconds, coming in around 1600th in a field of around 2500 runners. In addition to running, I played tennis, racket ball and squash, occasional softball and terrible golf. I was also  an aggressive water and snow skier, swam laps and lifted light weights to keep my body trim and fit. So in this regard, I knew and know my body and what it needs to feel good,, look good and stay healthy and probably why I was so freaked out about my muscle atrophy and developed an insane determination to stop the atrophy and repair the damage.

If you know your body and it’s limitations and understand how to treat it, get off your butt and get started exercising. It doesn’t matter what you do to get started, but starting an exercise program is the first step to feeling much better.  

Start exercising. Do it now.

If you need inspiration, google:

Changing Course: Jimmy Choi”s Story

If that doesn’t inspire you, nothing will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgRDYZoUnac

You Have a Bad Attitude. This Is Good.

Developing the attitude necessary to do everything possible to resist PD is not a process where you wake up one morning and you decide you have a new attitude. You need to find the attitude that works instinctively for you. You know, something that comes natural. For me, I’m afraid it was a bad attitude that was recognized early on. I seem to remember my mother warning me that as a teen ager I had a bad attitude and I should watch it. (Love you Mom. Mom just celebrated her 96^th birthday.) I distinctly remember one of my football coaches saying, “You know what I like about you? Your bad attitude. That chip on your shoulder.”  I don’t know if having a certain attitude is a prerequisite for fighting Parkinson’s or a good idea for everyone because we are all different and our motivation triggers may be different. Look for what gets you going or sets you off. Find that chip on your shoulder. Use it to resist PD.

For me, having a bad attitude is good. Having a short fuse also helps. Having no patience is one of my faults as a person. With Parkinson’s, this is a virtue. I take this flaw, this negative, and use it to motivate action to stop whatever is happening to me because of PD.  Now combine that flaw with another flaw of mine, the need to get even, and you have a winner, and a real bad attitude. Now focus that, magnify it. Get obsessed with it. And aim it at what makes you miserable: you got it! PD. (Try not to aim anywhere else with this attitude. It might be dangerous!) I have seen psychological profiles of people with PD and that use terms like irritable, ill tempered, and crabby. (You gotta problem with that?)

There you have me in a capsule. An impatient, revengeful, and sometimes crabby old man with a bad attitude. The perfect profile to resist Parkinson’s.

Next, I will show you how to make your bad attitude work for you, just as I found that it works for me. More proof that symptoms can be beaten back through hard work and bad attitude. See recent photo of fully recovered muscle that was previously withered to less than half its current condition.

Exercise to combat Parkinson's Disease

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.