“A conversation with N, a friend of mine and patient of Parkinson

“Nothing in life is to be feared,
it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more,
so that we may fear less”.
Marie Curie

A mutual friend explains me by phone and in summary the case of N and she asked me out for coffee home and to talk to her, because she had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease long time ago and she was very worried and depressed.

Shy and retiring, I was greeted rather coldly. We sat and talked about some irrelevant issues to ease the tension. I thought that I must first win her trust.

N. was a retired officer, about 70 years and she was overwhelmed by parkinsonian symptoms. They are beginning to show their true face and also she felt her neurologist didn´t understand nor paid attention, etc.

First of all I made it clear I was not a doctor and that's what was going to tell him it was the result of my experience as a caregiver for the past 10 years of my father's life. I was talking about the trauma of diagnosis, the fear of the future, the fear to lose work, family and friends, lack of empathy with your doctor, etc., and she was nodding almost all these things that I mentioned. She recognized them as her own.

I told her about the case of “healing” of a woman named “Fátima” in a book of the neurologist Dr. Rafael Gonzalez Maldonado (we had taken as a real case, being actually a fictionalized reconstruction from several clinical cases), the case of Dr. Mark Peter Hurni, alleged cases of "self-healing" (Annetta Freeman, Howard Shifke, John Pepper), paradoxical kinesia, the amazing momentary health improvement of my father for a few minutes in 2010, the hope produced by the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Michael J. Fox Foundation collected for research studies, the spectacular videos of doctors Birkmayer and Permultter, the video of the blue glasses to control terrible dyskinesias caused by the medication in a patient, etc.

Once our friend and hostess left the living room to bring us something from the kitchen, I told her that there were many reasons for hope, that I would print her the scientific studies she wanted and I would teach her videos of those famous neurologists with the spectacular results (intravenous glutathione therapy with Dr. Perlmutter and intravenous NADH therapy with Dr. Birkmayer).

She began to mourn.
I imagine that the view of everything, unknown until then, was really difficult emotionally.

I explained her what my father and I were lost and confused so many years, that there was an official orthodox Neurology, which had advanced a lot, but not enough for the patients and their families (my father and I felt it in this way and also many others we talk to), but that there was another Neurology as scientific or more than the previous one, but that it looked for other ways. Sometimes the same neurologist had gone through two phases, such as Walther Birkmayer, firstly one of the “fathers” of levodopa and later one of the greatest "heretics" in the Parkinson world by proposing NADH (a form of vitamin B3) as an alternative and/or complement to the almost sacred "Levodopa". This "other Neurology" remained outside the official channels because, in our opinion, it had not yet been allowed to show its results in the daily clinic.

I recommended her that she buy the first two books of neurologist doctor Gonzalez Maldonado and even she go to his office in Granada (Spain), if possible.

I told her that Genetics, drugs and surgery had limitations, I told her about the importance of "antiparkinsonian" foods, the importance of the Sun and vitamin D, involved in 33 diseases and thousands of genes, the need for a physical activity as intense as possible approved by her neurologist and adapted to her personal circumstances, changing emotions, laughing, crying, getting angry, putting on music throughout the day ... imagining a weighing scale with a positive cymbal and another negative. In the first one she had to accumulate all the factors against Parkinson's disease that she could. In the second, she had to eliminte from her life all the possible factors that are believed to favor the disease. Tens, hundreds. And always consult everything with the neurologist. If it did not hurt you, go ahead. Wisely, but with perseverance.

The farewell was very different from what happened just an hour and a half before. She hugged me and gave me two kisses. She whispered: "Thank you, you've given me the courage to live and fight".

Now N. was much less shaking, his face was more expressive and she smiled.
That was one of the most enriching experiences in recent years.”

(Jesus Marquez Rivera, Parkinson's here and now).

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Note in October 2020:
Before sending this text, written sometime between 2012 and 2014, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, sadness and anger for not knowing more then to be able to help her more. And on the other hand, a deep joy, when I realized that the years of effort and the thousands of hours dedicated to searching and reading, sharing and enriching myself in the chat of our community, have borne fruit: we now know a hundred times more than 6 or 7 years ago.