Originally Posted by Fiona

Hi Paula dear,
I am suggesting that global economics could be a major contributing factor, that the disease is actually shaped and sustained by market forces through manipulation of the body by the prescribed treatments. I am suggesting that people like pharmaceutical companies and movement disorder specialists (many good-hearted people there definitely) nonetheless have a certain strong incentive to enlist lifelong consumers of their services and products, and that in turn has a created a cultural identity of the PD patient.

In countries where efforts to do that are not going to yield consistent profits because the patient base can't sustain that track financially, something else happens...I'm not sure what. People in some ways eat more naturally here, but in many ways it is probably more polluted, food more contaminated. Poverty and violence are hugely stressful situations. Yet in my light reading on the subject, and in my personal observation, PD is considerably rarer in poor countries than the top industrialized nations, especially YO. That cultural identity is not as prevalent.

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