I have worked with 3 doctors. Dr. Kalish, Dr. Stein, and Dr. Oler. Out of all 3, Dr. Oler is the best in my opinion. The issue I had with Dr. Kalish is it takes forever to be able to get a consult and the prices for consults are quite high being at $400 a hour. I also am not even sure if he still works with Dr. Hinz as based on a previous post by GerryW it seemed as if Dr. Kalish was discontinuing working with him for some reason. Dr. Stein retired, from my experience with him, he was quite educated on everything, but he was not at all good about working with patients. He didn't keep records of what we had done so far and seemed to have too many things on his plate since whenever there was a problem he would almost give the impression of wanting to give up. With my experience with Dr. Oler, it is easy to get a consult set-up, he responds to e-mails everyday, keeps good records, is open to my opinion/ideas, and the consult prices are half of what Dr. Kalish's are. I would make sure that Dr. Kalish still treats parkinsons patients based on Dr. Hinz's researched protocol before doing a consult with him.

With my personal case, I do not have Parkinsons disease rather different symptoms resulting from multiple concussions a few years ago. The main symptoms being cognitive/thinking issues/brain fog, depression, extreme fatigue, OCD, Tinnitus, and headaches. The research on the monamine system done by Dr. Hinz indicates that treatment of all of these diseases (full list found here: http://new.neurosciencemyths.com/wp-...lticolored.jpg) is caused by the same dysfunction, thus the same form of restoration of electrical flow byway of providing adequate serotonin and dopamine precursors aka 5-htp, L-Tyrosine, and L-dopa along with a Sulfur amino acid like L-Cysteine will relieve all of these symptoms of disease. For each patient depending on the area and amount of the brain damaged or the amount of depletion of neurotransmitters or genetic anomaly will be the deciding factor as to the amounts of pre-cursors needed to alleviate symptoms.

So with my case, within the first month of starting the protocol I was on the dosage of 8 NR, 6 Cys, and 2 D5 Mucuna. On this dosage I had a vast improvement in symptoms. I would say I was 70% better. I stayed on this dosage for a month as I was dumbfounded by the fact that my symptoms had improved so much as I thought I was never going to get better. Over time the beneficial effects of the dosage slowly started to fade away until I was only a little better from when I started. It has been quite a long road from then until where I am now, going on 2 years now, and the reason being that my case is not of that which is typically seen. Most patients who are not Parkinsons or RLS fall into two categories. Either Three Phase or Dopamine Dominant. Over 90% are three phase which basically means the Three phase response that is observed by doing lab tests is how dosage determination is made. These patients typically need small amounts of dopamine precursors and medium to higher amounts of serotonin. I've expanded on this more in previous posts. Around 8-9% are dopamine dominant patients where the treatment method is basically the same as Parkinsons patients, but typically these patients do not need nearly as much L-dopa to control symptoms. There is a 3rd kind of patient known as Straddle or Mixed Dominant that is very rare, these patients need large amounts of both L-dopa and 5-htp, less than one percent of patients fall into this category. Unfortunately for me, I am one of them. There is not much data on Mixed Dominant patients, as well as me not being identified as one until 6 months ago, so it has been a hard journey so far.

After that period where I had 70% relief of symptoms for a month, I instantly started researching all of this stuff immensely as I was blown away by the fact that it was able to improve my condition so much. After the beneficial effects went away, I started working with Dr. Stein, because I knew based on the fact that I got quite a bit better and based on what I read that this was legit, and we did a dopamine challenge. The dopamine challenge is basically a test where you give someone 6 D5 Mucuna pills and if they do not have negative effects from it like terrible brain fog, memory problems, etc. then they are deemed to be dopamine dominant. Looking back now it makes sense because I do need higher amounts of L-dopa BUT I also need high amounts of 5-htp. So for quite a few months I was only taking large amounts of L-dopa as we increased the values and did pill stops. Honestly my entire experience on this protocol so far would take a few pages to fully write out and explain and I don't want to bore you so I will just leave it at that.

Coming back to your personal situation, I believe that if you go back down to 7.2 g of Mucuna a day which is equivalent to 24 pills, do a pill stop for 2 days, see if there is symptomatic relief at any moment during the pill stop, if not then increase to 9 g, repeat process, increase to 10.8 g, repeat process, etc. Until you do a pill stop on a dosage and get a period of symptomatic relief which would identify the dosage range needed to fine tune on.

Also, you did not answer my question earlier about if on the 'holy grail' period were you only on 10 g of Mucuna a day or were you taking 10 g plus the 11 g at bedtime so 21 g in total?