to me it seems like naturopaths and other alternative practitioners make more of an attempt to help however some of them are also motivated by profit. Our personal experience has been women practitioners have been inclined to try to find something that is helpful and not terribly expensive or complicated (requiring numerous visits to achieve improvement)
On the contrary, fast walking has been proven by the Mayo Clinic to reverse PD symptoms. I have had Pd since 1992 and have done the fast walking every second day and at the age of 88 I am stilll fast walking.
Bless your heart, John. I continuously mention your name to my husband. We were following your walking protocol, however, after his fall last July, he has gone through some really tough times. We still go out for walks, but for shorter distance and with the help of his trekking poles.
There was a recent article in The Economist about fraud in clinical trials. I’ve copied some of the more interesting parts. You don’t have to subscribe to read the article, but you do have to give them your name and email.
“Partly or entirely fabricated papers are being found in ever-larger numbers, thanks to sleuths like Dr Mol. Retraction Watch, an online database, lists nearly 19,000 papers on biomedical-science topics that have been retracted (see chart 1). In 2022 there were about 2,600 retractions in this area—more than twice the number in 2018. Some were the results of honest mistakes, but misconduct of one sort or another is involved in the vast majority of them.”
Most fabricated papers come from one of two sources. Some, particularly those claiming to report clinical trials, are the products of prolific individual fraudsters or groups of fraudsters. Others, more often purporting to be about basic science, such as molecular biology, are written, for a fee, by outfits known as “paper mills”. Frequently, these are fabricated by copying published papers and substituting the gene or disease a legitimate paper refers to with another.
It is a particular problem in China. Unrealistic publication quotas are often needed to obtain the best jobs in hospitals, and those who publish in top journals also get big cash bonuses. Not surprisingly, China is thus a country that has developed a thriving paper-mill industry.
How much cheating is never caught is anyone’s guess. As Dr Bishop notes, “The only ones we know about are the ones that are not very good at it. If somebody is very good at fraud, you’re not going to detect it.” And it is not just a few bad apples.
In 2009 plos one published a round-up of 18 surveys of scientists, mostly in America, that had asked about fraud. Though only 2% of respondents admitted falsifying data themselves, 14% said they knew someone who had. Similarly, a third of those asked confessed to other questionable research practices, such as dropping inconvenient data points based on “gut feeling”, or making important changes to a study’s protocol while it was in progress. But they pointed the finger at 72% of their colleagues. America is not exceptional in this.
In a survey of academics in Britain, published in 2016, nearly one in five reported having fabricated data. And in a recent survey of researchers in the Netherlands, 10% of those in the life and medical sciences admitted they had falsified or fabricated data.
…retracted papers are often not flagged prominently as such in online libraries and so continue to be cited as if they were valid research.
…scientists have tried and failed to replicate the results of a landmark study Dr Lesné published in Nature in 2006, which appeared to provide crucial evidence concerning a hypothesis that links the disease with so-called amyloid plaques in the brain, and which is one of the most cited papers in Alzheimer’s research. This particular article may have sent an entire line of scientific inquiry into that hypothesis in the wrong direction, by pointing a finger at one particular form of amyloid beta, the plaque-forming protein.
…as many as 100,000 published papers about human genes may emanate from paper mills, and that a quarter of these are such that they “may misinform the future development of human therapies”.
…it usually takes two to three years to get an expression of concern or a retraction published. “The only way we get retractions is to repeatedly badger the journals over and over and over again”.
…worry about an arms race between fabricators and those employed to catch them. Such fears are amplified by the growing sophistication of artificial-intelligence (ai) tools like Chatgpt. In a recent study for which this was asked to generate 50 medical-research abstracts, both human reviewers and an ai-output detector failed to identify a third of the bot’s papers as such.
Despe, my good friend, the problem with PD is that once you know you have it, the horse is out of the barn! What is it, 80% of the dopaminergic neurons are destroyed by the time symptoms show? Something like that. How are you going to regrow that much? Maybe even if you could regrow enough to get you back the the point of being symptom free, that would do, but you are really swimming up steam against the current, because theyre dying at a faster rate than they can regrow.
The best thing, of course, is to catch it early, which is somewhat possible with genetic testing in some cases and I heard something about dogs sniffing ear wax, which sounds nuts but there is science behind that!
The second thing you can do is try to stop what is killing you cells from doing further damage. In my own case, a lot of what caused mine was sleep related. Not sure if that was the only thing, but once I got that under control (by not being on call with the hospital at night, my kids sleeping through the night and getting on CPAP for sleep apnea) things improved quite a bit.
The third thing we can do is try to improve autophagy and enable our body's garbage disposal system to more effectively and efficiently clean up the tangled proteins that are choking the neurons.
Of course theres exercise, as our good friend Mr Pepper always talks about, increasing circulation and BDNF (which stands for something that means Brain's Delicious Neuron Food!)
What is a drug or therapy going to do? Well, lets see. They can work on replacing the neurons with stem cells, but we have to hope that they dont go and die like the rest. Also hope they dont turn out to be cancerous, God forbid! Then those neurons need to make the connections with each other in the right order. Sounds complicated to me.
What else? They can use CRISPR gene editing to splice the offending DNA and replace it with non parkie DNA. Thats probably in the pipeline now somewhere. Im not sure about the exact numbers but I think only 4% of PD cases are genetic in nature. Correct me if Im wrong. But the vast majority I believe, are caused by environmental factors such as neurotoxins.
There's lots to try and Im sure theyre trying. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that whomever is making billions off of Sinemet right now is probably suppressing technology. The Rockerfellers. perhaps? It is known! God help us all!
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