Please forgive the flippancy. It helps me approach sanity.
PD is far more than dead neurons, low dopamine, and even the glucose issues. It is systemic and probably affects everything. Your statement, "There must be something fundamentally wrong in the balance of the body, but what?" says a great deal. [IMHO] It seems to me that YOPD comes down to a loss of the ability to maintain that balance. This often comes after a lifetime spent in pursuit of a similar goal in our lives, jobs, relationships, etc. We are like an old time vaudeville act spinning plates on the ends of sticks.
There have been a half-dozen or more destructive processes reported as relevent. Mitochondrial impairment. Misfolded proteins. But my bet (this week, anyway) is neuroinflammation. Our bodies pour out a dozen or more chemicals into our functional center (the CNS) and the bloodstream spreads them to our far corners.
As you point out, it is almost impossible to see past the drugs. Six months ago, I switched to ldopa/cdopa for that very reason. It seems to have helped.
The system which maintains the greater Meta-Balance and allows adaptation to a changing environment has a fluid foundation. It is a brilliant design when it works, but a real mess when it doesn't. As a result, things that work today may be useless tomorrow.
What to do? This month it is anti-inflammatories. Next month????
-Rick
Quote:
Originally Posted by lurkingforacure
The more I seem to learn, the less I seem to know! Six years into this journey, I am just now learning that insulin issures are part of PD as well, which complicates things considerably, at least to me. It is yet another area that PD affects, and must be dealt with. There are others as well, of course, blood pressure, liver/kidney function, etc. But realizing that glucose uptake and utilization is probably involved in PD as well is daunting because of the vital role those play to the survival of every cell in the body.
The question I have is this: how on earth do we figure out what is going on in our bodies, when they are full of meds with some known and a whole lot of unknown side effects? We cannot possibly get an accurate "read" on what is wrong with us when we are riddled with drugs, many of which cause the very symptoms they are supposed to alleviate. Yet we cannot realistically get off the meds to see what all is going on!
The other thing I have been wondering for some time is this. If, like diabetics, we simply lack something, be it dopamine or insulin, then we should, theoretically, be able to replace that and live an otherwise happy, carefree life. But it doesn't work that way for either disease. Diabetics take insulin for life, but continue to have increasingly significant problems like vision loss, neuropathy, etc. We all know what taking sinemet does. And why is this? There must be something fundamentally wrong in the balance of the body, but what? And how can we really tell what it is when the body is full of meds which it is trying to balance out in addition to the condition the meds are given for in the first place? Aaaagh!
I'm not articulating this very well at all. Has anyone gone away somewhere pristine, eaten a completely nutrionally balanced diet, drank pure water, breathed pure air, all without drugs in the body? And if so, what happened to the PD symptoms?
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