Jean, love the concreteness of your suggestions - very helpful.

But I think at this point it does matter what the subject of a clinical trial is. There are limited amounts of funding and support for these things. Will it really help us to consume limited resources by testing five more mediocre at best dopamine agonists in hopes that someone can pull some kind of patent payoff for a little while?

What about emphasizing support and enrollment for trials for stuff that is really different from the existing approaches - for nutritional research, for example, or more intensive physical therapy research? My doctor's office says they have been looking all over the USA for nutritionists trained and skilled enough to address Parkinson's Disease and found virtually no one except the lovely lady at the NPF forum.

I have been in a nutritional clinical trial myself for the Ketogenic Diet actually, but very small and while the results were promising, I've never heard anything about it. In terms of the medications that have been tried with me, I feel like my whole treatment history has been a series of clinical trials really.

There are so many concrete issues to address in Parkinson's - I think it totally matters where people put their energy, whether on the researcher or volunteer side.