Well, it's hard to improve on all of your thoughtfulness, and I appreciate Carey's reminders that hope twinned with action provides the greatest impetus forward as we all take on this promising-no-thrilling! new venture.
Thus, I'd like to add here a personal theory about why, united and brainstorming, we Parkies generate so much power. It's a postulation based on recent neuroscience that I shot off to Carey (and alot of others) back in the early spring; one that I hope will pump this group up even more.

ok-here goes: it dawned on me one morning, wondering why many of us stay up all night devising creative strategies for promoting and accelerating our cure, (or, in some cases, working on artistic endeavors), that dopamine may be stimulated by the act of generating and then acting upon a new idea, and I wondered whether or not, if that were to be borne out as true, we Parkies might become addicted to the rush of dopamine, or whatever neurotransmitter is stimulated that may produce dopamaine, and then that secretion then produces a feedback loop that almost forces us to keep on generating new ideas.

Within hours of me waking early one morning and staggering to my laptop to write this up, I opened an e-mail to find news from Science Daily corroborating my theory, (without specifically mentioning dopamine) stating that two neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins had just discovered that the medial prefrontal cortex of the brains of jazz musicians, while improvising, lights up, which is the part of the brain connected with self-expression, while simultaneously, the dorsal lobe, which is involved with inhibition, is deactivated.

And I quote: "the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests...The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself."

The implications, they concluded, are that any kind of improvising would cause this to happen. I submit that Parkies putting their brains together in a frenzied and driven effort to improve our lot, must cause a whole lot of frontal lobe fireworks!! The logical extension to that lighting up, I imagine, would be the secretion of neurotrasmitters, which I'll bet we use to keep medicating ourselves to "keep on goin' on."
At the behest of my neuroogist, who trotted me off to share my theory at a luncheon within a Sunday seminar that he was running, I proposed this idea to his friend, Dr. Felice Ghilardi, a neuroscientist who was presenting on Parkies and music, that morning. She grew quite excited, and proposed that she and I, at some point, sit down and devise a paradigm for a research experiment to test our brains while we were creating new ideas, specifically targeting dopamine production.

We exchanged e-mail addresses, I wrote it up and sent it to her, and perhaps some day we will actually hammer this out. (I won't hold my breath-these guys are over-extended beyond belief) Suffice it to say, I was beyond delighted to be validated as having a workable hypothesis, and I'm already quite sure, based on anecdotal and personal experience, that not only poetry-writing on my part, or the act of teaching kids to write poetry, (both part of my world) but also PD activism, and advocacy-brainstorming by those of us deeply motivated to get better, are very likely acts which are neurogenerative, and undoubtedly tap into new and unexpected reserves of energy that keeps us alive (and pecking away at our keyboards). And exponentially, like a group of jazz musicians, the degree of sparks flying when we operate as a group makes for some awesome riffing!!!
in good cheer, Leonore

P.S. From arrticle: One of the researchers, Limb, "... notes that this type of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for artists and non-artists alike. For example, he notes, people are continually improvising words in conversations and improvising solutions to problems on the spot. “Without this type of creativity, humans wouldn’t have advanced as a species. It’s an integral part of who we are,” Limb says.

He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists, as well as non-artists asked to improvise.

The study is published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One. http://www.plosone.org/article/fetch...l.pone.0001679

This research was funded by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.