My father(63y.o.) has had Parkinson's for over a decade. I am his son and his main caregiver. He has been on Carbidopa/levodopa for 5+ years. Initially, the drugs aided him to walk and function completely normal with no signs of any Parkinson's symptoms. However, within the last 2 years his symptoms started to become visible and within the last year, he has become almost fully immobile. It has been hard on him and especially me to see him loose most of his independence. My dad has always feared prescription drugs in fear of side affects. He recently read an article about an Amino acid protocol treatment by Dr. Marty Hinz and he was able to find a local doctor trained in the protocol which she guarantees can 100% successfully treat him. I was highly skeptical of her claims, but after doing research it seems promising. I would like to get some opinions from anybody here who has been on the protocol with success or failure. Any tips on other successful methods to ease symptoms would be helpful too.

Thank you

Give it a try Jeff. If thats what your father and you want.

doesn't this MD have patients you can talk to that are successfully benefitting from the hinz treatment? if you can't meet and talk to other pd'ers getting relief from this treatment that would be a red flag to me. the hinz protocol isn't cheap, the few users on this board recently complained about price increases if i remember correctly.

there are lots of treatment options between only carbidopa/levodopa and a very expensive, non-independently verified amino acid treatment. how much C/L is he presently taking and what else has he tried? i can't imagine any neurologist just trying C/L when someone is immobile.

Jeff there are many people who are successfully using the Hinz protocol. I believe there are some who have been using as long as 8 years. When it works it works well. It does take some time and a little bit of tweaking to get the right dose. It may cost more than conventional drugs. I'm sure we both agree your fathers worth it.

Make sure your MD has a good amount of experience treating people with this protocol.

desperate people often do desperate things and waste a lot of money. there have been no independent trials testing this procedure. the argument is there's no money for the trials, it's all natural ingredients so you can't get patent protection.

but ask yourself, if this procedure consistantly works better than C/L, why are you asking about it on a message board where there's no way to prove the responder has pd much less is getting a benefit? and did they ever even try C/L?

With the internet and social media making it impossible to hide a better alt-med treatment than C/L, the ease of crowdsourcing to fund startups and considering the high price charged for the amino acids used here, it should be easy to fund a trial. if i had someone stand up that i had known for years and trusted at a pd support group meeting and say, i've had great success with the hinz treatment, anyone want to join a trial, i'd consider it. but that's never happened.


finally, who's to say they aren't adding C/L to their supplements? just playing devil's advocate.

Jeff I'm glad your keeping an open mind about this. You may want to talk to Dr. Hinz directly.

Actually NO doctor provides information about his patients to other pations, not in Hinz's protocol or traditional drugs. Can you imagine going for a heart surgery and asking your doctor to give you the personal details of other patients????

There are NOT alot of treatments abesides Levadopa+carbidopa, actually this is the point, PwP are giving a "sentence" of having enormours problems after 5 to 10 years with Levadopa+carbidopa. That is why Hinz started his investigations.

The fact that the protocol isn't cheap is because most insurances don't cover it, actuall Azilect costs about 280$ per month and nobody complains about it, because insurances do cover it. we've got to a point in which we only believe in what has been aproved by a laboratory, but medicine didn't start 100 years ago, but centuries ago, there is a knowledge in ayudrvedic medicine, for example, which has been treating PD with mucuna for centuries. Actually most medicines are either made with plants or replicate the chemical structure of certain natural products.

The best verification for the treatment is 1200 people who have not had diskinesias and have not experienced how their drugs were not effective anymore.

I have taken the Hinz protocol for a few years with considerable success. I have never taken any prescription drugs. The disadvantages are high cost and the inconvenience of weighing and mixing powders several times a day. I currently take 34.5 g of Mucuna (40% levodopa) daily plus 45 g of tyrosine.

I also take l-cysteine, B6 (400 mg a day) and 5-HTP.

Gerry,

You write:

"I currently take 34.5 g of Mucuna (40% levodopa) daily plus 45 g of tyrosine."

That's approximately 14g of levodopa per day, plus whatever may come from the tyrosine. This compares with for most people on C/L of under 1g (= 1000mg) per day.

I think it would be really useful to everyone if we understood why these numbers are so different.

For a start, you don't take carbidopa. Wikipedia states that [1]:

"Carbidopa reduces the amount of levodopa required to produce a given response by about 75% ..."

That reduces the comparable level from 14g to approximately 3g.

Are there any other corrections to make?

How do you avoid nausea with these amounts of levodopa?

Reference:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbidopa

John

The doctors who have pioneered the protocol Gerry is on have a paper where they give the reasoning and mechanisms for how the nausea is controlled through administration of 5-htp instead of using Carbidopa. They also discuss other negative affects of Carbidopa and why it is not necessary for the use of treating parkinsons when using 5-htp, which allows for avoidance of side effects.

Here is an excerpt from the paper that may be of assistance in understanding how Carbidopa and 5-htp work.

"Through irreversible inhibition of AADC, carbidopa or benserazide compromises peripheral synthesis of serotonin and dopamine. This drug-induced inhibition of peripheral metabolism of l-dopa by AADC leaves more l-dopa unmetabolized and available to freely cross the blood–brain barrier into the central nervous system. As a result, when carbidopa or benserazide is administered, lower l-dopa daily intake values are required to achieve the same central nervous system results.4,6

It is documented that 5-HTP controls l-dopa-induced nausea, utilizing the same basic chemical mechanism as carbidopa and benserazide: AADC inhibition. Carbidopa and benserazide inhibition is irreversible while 5-HTP inhibition is reversible. The use of 5-HTP is superior, since under proper administration it is a nutrient that does not deplete systems or induce abnormal system functions when properly administered.1,7,35–37

If the goal of administering 5-HTP for the control of l-dopa-induced nausea is to have it function as a nutrient, this is not merely a simple substitution. It requires concomitant administration of l-dopa with 5-HTP, along with the “core nutrients”: l-tyrosine, a thiol (l-cysteine, glutathione, S-adenosyl methionine, or l-methionine), and cofactors (vitamin C, vitamin B6, and calcium carbonate). Administration of properly balanced core nutrients needs to be guided by organic cation-transporter type 2 functional status analysis, in order to achieve a balance that does not convert the nutrients into a drug."

Here is the paper - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4238750/