First, thank you, Robert, for the kind words. I think I will go by the simple "Rat" for brevity.

Isis, (IMHO always), you and we are canaries in the mine. The Industrial Revolution began about 1750 in London. The first undeniable description of PD was made in London in 1817. One of the basic changes of the IR was the introduction of chronic stress into the average person's daily life. Before that time acute stress was the norm and the social structure of the extended family handled that well.

Chronic stress is very destructive over time. It produces physical alterations in the endocrine system in the areas dedicated to maintaining a state of balance or health (homeostasis). These alterations lead to constantly elevated stress hormones which destroy tissue as well as interfere chemically with normal function.

The wild card in all this is that these changes become hereditary by virtue of the effects of maternal stress hormones upon the fetus. And it is transgenerational - meaning that although yourmother led a stress free life, the stresses your grandmother endured affect your system.

The bottom line is that if one introduces chronic stress into a society, over time the norm for that society is going to change in a negative manner. The negative effects of chronic stress are going to accumulate and bring a host of vulnerabilities with them. In PD, it synergizes with neuroinflammation. All these other maladies of modern times (CFS, bipolar, schizophrenia, autism, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, ...) show tantalizing links to this disruption of balance, which is why my own blog is entitled A Matter of Balance.

The point of this rambling crash course is that I am becoming more and more convinced that the LDN and LDDXM regimens are going to prove to be a new approach in Western medicine - the adaptogen. Long a familiar concept in the East, the idea of a drug that simply makes it possible for one's body to right itself is new. But it provides an explanation for why patients dealing with a dozen different diseases report success and do so emphatically. Keep us posted. -Rick