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ex-Member
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Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 110
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ex-Member
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 110
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Parkinson's Disease ? What Parkinson's Disease ?
25% of people "with" Parkinson's Disease are wrongly diagnosed, due either to having a Parkinsonism : , or toxicity :
Those people that are tremor dominant are frequently wrongly diagnosed. They often have Essential Tremor, which has many causes that are nothing to do with Parkinson's Disease.
Even those people that were correctly diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease would now not be considered as having Parkinson's Disease if it was not for the drugs that were prescribed when they were diagnosed as having Parkinson's Disease.
Parkinson's Disease is basically due to not forming sufficient dopamine. However, the amount of dopamine that somebody produces is changing all the time, which is why symptoms can fluctuate so much. Millions of people that are never diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease will have low dopamine levels at some time, but not for long enough in order to get a diagnosis.
If somebody has low dopamine for just a few months they can be diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. They will usually end up on L-dopa or a dopamine agonist at some point. However, due to a process called feedback inhibition, no common substance actually lowers somebodys own L-dopa formation than L-dopa itself. Although dopamine agonists initially stimulate dopamine receptors, their long term effect is to make the dopamine receptors progressively less receptive. This is why people tend to need higher and higher dosages, and more and more drugs, until they end up having hardly any effect.
So if somebody has low dopamine for a few months they will get a diagnosis and then be put on drugs which themselves will end up causing Parkinson's Disease, due to how the body reacts against them. Their problem ends up not being Parkinson's Disease at all, but the drugs that they have been given to relieve the Parkinson's Disease.
That's no problem for the pharmaceutical companies. At over a billion dollars a year, a downward spiral in symptoms, due to the drugs that they themselves have produced means that they have customers for years or decades that have ever increasing need for their products.
Last edited by Curious; 09-04-2007 at 11:06 AM.
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