Worth a listen, set aside an hour:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/parkins...ull-recovery-f

49 bucks a month for his secret. Hmmm, I don't know, I smell a rat!

I smell a rat when I hand over 150 euro to a neurologist for fifteen minutes of disinterested 'attention', and the dispensing of pure poison, with little follow through.

You can listen to the interview for free and there is a lot of valuable information in it. Why shouldn't he charge for his time, anymore than a bio-medical practitioner, not one of whom can claim to have assisted anyone into a state of being symptom free. Coleman has knowledge and he could not possibly respond to all requests for it, given the volume of demand, without charging for it. There is no one-size-fits-all remedy and dealing with individual cases is effortful, if done well.

Muireann,
He's a known charlatan here in Australia and INMO a complete wanker who tries to rip PWP with his pathway recovery from PD. Fortunately with little success here.
The parkinsons association and community here have been complaining about his ludicrous claims for many years now.
Previously he claims to have recovered from not just PD but a Parkinsons Plus syndrome which makes it even more untruthful.
I'm not having a go at you Muireann I'm just very annoyed that he has the gall to tell us like it's fact and vulnerable people newly diagnosed or those further down the track might stop taking the levodopa their MDS recommends or prescribes which would otherwise give them a greater degree of relief from the rigidity and bradykinesia they would otherwise suffer with.
Apologies for offending anyone who took much notice of him but on behalf of many parkies here I find this man "deeply offensive."

Could you elaborate on what, in your opinion, makes him a "known wanker" or a "complete charlatan". On what do you base your opinion? I am genuine interested to know. It's a substantial claim and you must have your reasons?

Hi Muireann,
When you first posted about him I thought I'd let it slide down the list without commenting and it'd die a natural death but when you defended him it got my blood pressure rising.
He claims like I said in my previous posting to have had a Parkinsons Plus syndrome (MSA) which as you probably know has a much poorer prognosis than the PD that most of here us are diagnosed formally by an MDS with.
He hasn't got or ever suffered from any form of PD and tried advertising in our Parkinsons magazine, without any success as his claims were proven to be ridiculous, and without any real medical proof.
Unfortunately he advertised his pathways program in other places and may have pulled it off for a while but listening to his interview brought back that sickening feeling that he's still cashing in on PWP's vulnerability.

At 14 years after tremors and rigidity and loss of strength started my unmedicated symptoms started looking very much like MSA and were escalating much faster then progression of the initial sx . I had an extreme frozen shoullder and couldn't drive, or barely feed myself. Whhen I decided that I hhad little left to lose I started low dose of sinemet which i am still experiencing new improvements on 2 years later however i cut back my dosage at every opportunity from a max of 4 tabs per/day down to 1 or 2 on really good days . The med has given me back my life.

i thank god for the people who have recovered and i have met onne myself-these folks are bridge builders nno matter what brrand of pdism they recoverred from. i have heard that coleman worked at a copper mine but this is herresay hhowever i wouldd think acute manganese poisoning or lymes disease may be less complicated than idiopathic parkinsons. never underestimate the power of beliefs...positive and negative. one that i am reflecting on now is my belief that there are no easy fixes for me. iis tthat true? NO one can actually KNOW %100 that it iss true! yet my subconscious seems to hang onto it. so now the work is exploring the fears that feed the belief and surrendering those fears to a higher power because like poseidon told odysseus ...we are NOTHING without grace. sorry the typos

Moondaughter,

You are putting up a heroic battle and I applaud you. I send you my very best wishes for symptom relief and recovery. Belief has so much to do with how we become ill and the extent to which we recover. And negative beliefs are very difficult to manipulate.

Would it be possible to speak a little more of what you know of the person you met who has recovered, without breach of confidentiality of course.

Without making a judgement on Mr Coleman go to research done on charlatans. When studied, most people who sell unproven methods rely on the placebo effect which shows a 60% effectiveness, ie, 60% of those who believe it will work receive some positive effect.

Charlatans have two common qualities stated or implied in their information regarding claims of results in the face of incurable diseases:
1. They claim they can completely cure you
2. They claim that something in your attitude or way of dealing with the world has helped cause the disease in you.

#1 takes advantage of your deep rooted desire to turn back the clock
#2 very sneaky, almost hypnotically suggests you to open up further, which will increase your tendency to succumb to the placebo effect. This also allows them to eschew the 40% of believers who get no result because of some defect in their attitude or manner of dealing with the world...

Ask yourself these questions about Mr. Coleman. I just don't have enough knowledge about what he's doing or what he's claiming to accurately comment. The answers can usually be found in the claims being made. A third claim, less common than 1 or 2 would be if he were to say or imply that PD is not a real disease. Again, I don't know enough about his claims so I cannot comment.

Search "quack"** for more on detecting quacks.

Dopadoc,

You say that you are not making a judgement on Coleman, but in locating your discussion of him here, by name, in the very negative semiotic neighbourhood of 'charlatans' and 'quacks', you are certainly not lending any credibility to him.

Even more questionable, you are creating these negative associations from a position of a good deal of social capital yourself, as doctor and researcher with PD, though in your own words you admit you "just don't have enough knowledge about what he's doing or what he's claiming to accurately comment." Then why do so?

Coleman does not claim to 'cure' people, as you will see if you familiarise yourself with the foregoing discussion and/or interview with him [transcript and audio link provided above], therefore there is no need to lump him into an exposition on the nature of charlatanism and quackery.

Regarding your concerns about the placebo effect, a placebo effect is only problematic if it is not sustainable indefinitely. Indeed, most medical professionals would accept that an individual's ability to believe in the capacity of one's body to heal itself and a faith in one's carers is a pre-requisite to any sustained recovery, and that its functional mechanism is very much in the realm of placebo, though no less real or organic for being so.

I would argue that we should be a lot more worried about the corresponding nocebo effect of the callous ways in which diagnoses and damning prognoses are meted out by the medical profession, depriving people of hope and leading people to erroneously cede all responsibility for their current and future wellbeing to a biomedical profession whose knowledge agenda is set by the vested interests of the pharmaceutical industry.