I read the following in Recovery From Parkinsons Disease, a PDF book free on pdrecovery.org. Blows my mind! Take a look at the following excerpt and please comment if you have idiopathic parkinsons disease (PD with unknown origin)
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People with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease have a twenty-three day cycle of
movement ability, during which movement goes from good, to bad, and back to good again
over twenty-three days. A person with Parkinson’s will usually go from a very good day or
days, during which he has a great attitude and feels at the top of his game, and slowly slide, over the next eleven days, down into a pit in which he may be certain that he has never been so rigid (or negative, or tremory, or whatever his current, worst problem is). Then gradually, over another eleven days, he will cruise back up to the top again. The complete cycle lasts twenty-three days. And then it starts again.
The most uncanny thing about this cycle was that all my patients were on the same
twenty-three day cycle. My patients all had a “good day” on the same day, and eleven or
twelve days later, they all had their worst-ever day, and then, by day twenty-three, they all had a “good day” again.
The incredible thing was that this cycle did not just happen to my patients in my
office, in my hometown. It was happening to all the patients around the world who were in
email contact with me.
Before I realized that there was a cycle, I was often remarking to my family, over
dinner,
“I’m really excited: everyone is doing much better today.”
A week and a half later, I’d be saying, “Everyone is much worse today, I don’t know
what I’m doing wrong. Maybe I’m a fool for trying.” And then a week and a half later, I
would be rapturous with glee because “Everyone is doing so much better!”
My son finally pointed out that I’d been doing this up and down cycle for over a year,
and that it was impossible that “everyone” was doing poorly or that “everyone” was doing
well. Surely I was exaggerating.
I wasn’t exaggerating.
I went through my charts. I went through the emails that had been sent to me from
people I knew and from people that I had never met. Sure enough, there was a consistent,
twenty-three day cycle in people with Parkinson’s from around the world, even if I’d never met with or emailed with them before. In fact, I suddenly saw that I tended to get the most emails at the apex and nadir of the cycles.
This was unbiased reporting: the emailers who had never met any of us on the team
were not being influenced by me or by anyone in the project.
The other thing that was quite strange was that, since starting this project, there were
a few times that the low in the cycle was extremely low or the high was extremely high.
I recall that all my patients experienced a severe low in the first week of August of
1998. Another one occurred towards the end of January in 2000. I have not tracked enough of
these extremely powerful lows and highs to detect a pattern. I did not share this information with patients at first, because I feared “contamination” of my research data.
But once I had several years of data, I did present this information about the twentythree
day cycle to patients so that they could keep their chins up when they found themselves having a rough week or so.1
The influence of whatever it is that drives this cycle ceases when a person recovers
from Parkinson’s disease. The physical symptoms of Parkinson’s and the emotional symptoms of Parkinson’s (if any), the negativity, wariness, self-pity and/or fear or shame of
self-pity, and anxiety, were all influenced by the twenty-three day cycle.
1 Several friends of the project have tried to research the probable cause of this worldwide
cycle. The only astronomical event with a twenty-three day cycle that might possibly be driving the
pattern is a star in our galaxy that emits a strong radio wave in a twenty-three day cycle. This is not a
biorhythm pattern. Biorhythms begin on the day a person is born. Therefore, there are 365 potential
starting dates for the biorhythm cycles. But all PD patients seem to be stuck in the same cycle. It may
be that, when they shut down their heart, they fall out of their native biorhythm and into a sort of
default cycle that can be influenced by strong atmospheric phenomena.