[QUOTE= but I still cannot fully blame pharma for our woes. - Laura)

Agreed. Pharma sticks out because of the rawness of the greed, ever since the scientists, such as Dr. Merck, were replaced by fast-money lawyers and stock market dealers lunging for a card so high and wild they will never have to deal again. But it is not just Pharma, the Creator of Woes, as Laura points out. As your PD symptoms grab hold of your life, and you start to check out the empire that has been constructed around your disease, you find out that the disease is owned entirely by distant entities, without anyone speaking for the people who are actually being killed by it, and every layer you peel off reveals another layer - from top to bottom, from emergency room to science lab, from academic sloth to axes needing grinding, from "condition that existed previously and therefore not covered" health insurance to charities living high on the hog, to being fired from jobs just for the fact of having the disease, to being a visibly shaking minority that gets isolated and invisible, to being stonewalled by government agencies that are terrified of deciding anything, in case they are wrong, and get accused of allowing another thalidomide, to doctors in Florida paying $350K per year lawsuit insurance, to no one even tracking how many people have PD, to hospital personnel unaware of the existence of the disease -and then at the bottom of the blazing wreckage, there smoulders Amgen; and the GDNF story, which was a miniature summary of all of the above, with a massive dose of human rights failures baked into the cake.
All in all, taking into account every aspect of the Parkinson's Holy Empire, it would make a gigantic case study of just how dysfunctional a huge system can be - the cast of thousands, the expenditure of billions; Lancet claiming that one-third of PD medical studies are basically fraudulent; drugs disappearing and showing up for sale on the internet; it fails as a business model, it fails as a science model, it fails as a medical model, and it fails as a model of a caring society.
But we do get to turn the music up loud and at least pretend we
can dance. And things are changing - previous generations of Parkies had no Conductor 71, or Paula W, or Revertt123, or Imark or Soccertease - now the internet changes the game, and the future ain't gonna' look exactly like the past.
It could all be done, you know. Parkinson's could be defeated, for less than it is costing now.