Jeffreyn,

I'm sorry that my use of double quotes was unclear. I did not intend for them to indicate a direct quote, but, rather to indicate common-place metaphors. Like you, I couldn't find any direct examples on Google, so they are not as common in this context as I'd expected.

What I was trying to get at was that there are two approaches to the timing of initiating levodopa treatment, as Fox and Lang write [1]:

"Preventing the development of motor complications is one of the
principal concerns when treating patients with Parkinson’s disease,
and ‘levodopa-sparing’ approaches have been commonly touted
as the best method of achieving this. Early use of dopamine agonists,
rather than levodopa, was the preferred management strategy
in the 1990–2000s, and several large randomized controlled trials
reported delayed development of motor complications with this
approach. However, follow-up studies revealed that once patients
were started on levodopa, they developed motor complications of
the same severity and at the same rate irrespective of whether
levodopa had been initiated earlier or later."

Reference:

[1] "‘Don’t delay, start today’: delaying levodopa does not delay motor complications"
Fox S., Lang A.
Brain, 2014
‘Don’t delay, start today’: delaying levodopa does not delay motor complications | Brain | Oxford Academic

John