Have you ever wondered why you seem to have a slightly different "brand" of Parkinson's disease than many of the people on this board or at your local support group? It almost makes you wonder sometimes if you really have Parkinson's diaease or something altogether different. Also there are those nagging symptoms that lie outside the symptoms that define Parkinson's disease, as if Parkinson's isn't bad enough. When first dianosed my neurologist (bless her little pea-pickin' heart) told me that I was lucky that I picked a disease that has little pain associated with it. I agreed, because I had nearly no pain at all. Well, that was then...this is now. Sometimes the pain is down right severe on my individual pain tolerance scale. My pain tolerance scale is something like this: 1) oo, 2)oh, 3)ow, 4)ouch, 5)oo ow, 6)owee, 7)ahhhhh, 8)uhhhhhhh, 9)uhh uhhh uhhhhhhh uhhhhhhhhh O' God, 10) AAAAHHH HHHHHEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! where 1 is the least and 10 is the most. I can only recall two # 10's in my life thus far and that was when I had kidney stones and when I poured straight vinegar onto a severe concrete burn. The last one caused my ears to ring...oh maybe that was me screaming.

Anyway, enough of my history...let's get to the title of this somewhat lengthy post, "Initiation, Potentiation and Facilitation." That kind of sounds like something I would make up. Hmmm, I guess I did. How does it relate to Parkinson's disease? I hope we find out soon before you stop reading.

Some way, some how and by something an initial insult was made against our body. This was the Initiation Phase. We have seen that this could have been in the form of a virus, bacterial infection, toxic chemical (s), trauma or genetic transfer at birth, any or all of which probably had to be accompanied by some extremely stressful time in our life that might have weakened our immune system and caused a second or third insult called inflammation, which might have caused a breech in the blood brain barrier at just the right point to allow it to gain entrance to the substantia nigra. This was the Potentiation Phase. Upon gaining entrance to the substantia nigra it began it's invasion and subsequent destruction of our dopaminergic neurons. This is the Facilitation Phase during which we developed Parkinson's disease. And now, there IT is, destroying us one cell at a time, or two or three or nth depending on how many IT's there are.

Are you getting the picture? The question is, which IT GOT YOU, AND WHICH ONE GOT ME, AND WHERE WAS THEIR POINT OF ENTRY INTO OUR BRAINS? I think it was somewhere along the vagus nerve, but we will disccuss that further after I stop shaking.

michael b.