I hear a lot of discussion about Dr. Laurie Mischley in this forum. She has been very helpful to me so I want to share my experience under her treatment.
I am paraphrasing a letter of thanks I sent Dr Mischley recently. I have communicated with her via zoom for the last 4 years. I follow her dietary recommendations for the most part. It’s a struggle but my scores have remained steady, quite a bit down from my initial terrible score but snowing slow progression in the last 2 years.
I was diagnosed in 2013 but didn’t need medication until 2020. When it hit me I was unprepared for the misery my desease brought me. I did extensive research and I what i found out brought me even more misery than the never ending list of symptoms.
My research led me dr Mischley who offered a ray of hope. She crossed my path when I was the most miserable. At that time, the prevailing framework for Parkinson’s disease was that it was incurable, progressive, and basically you were “doomed and done.”
I don’t think anything has changed. It still feels like the medical research has abandoned this disease. It seems ironic to me that while this disease is labeled incurable the medical research does not concentrate in ameliorating symptoms by creating a better way of dispensing medication, that is effective and less invasive. I am basically taking the same meds used when the disease was first discovered.
For reasons that are not totally clear to me after meeting dr Mischley, I became more optimistic and hopeful about my future. I’ve been trying to understand what was the magic. For me personally it has to do with a course of action that is believable even if it doesn’t offer 100 percent certainty.
Dr Mischley presented a scenario where personal choices could affect the path the progression the disease took. That was empowering. It was not a “snake oil “ offering a cure all solution. The power of her confidence comes from the data provided by people like me who every day continue to add believability to her assertion.
If we follow the path taken by the majority of those winning the battle of progression we will likely do the same. Conversely, if we follow the bad choices we will experience similar accelerated progression I believe adhering to second path is more crucial.
What I personally like is dr Mischley’s candid admission that she doesn’t know for certain if it one or multiple factors that made for good or bad choice but we need to trust the general pattern.
Time and participants will clarify this as she and her team team continues to look for patterns and relationships among the different variables. Maybe for some the defining cause is poverty and lack of expensive choices.
The second component of dr Mischley’s approach is unfailing optimism and a “can do”attitude. I can be distrustful of naive optimism, but I appreciate her perspective “This is a big battle why not use all the possible resources we can get— “Believing has a better chance than not. So why not?”
Another powerful tool that dr Mischley has pointed out to me is that she believes we should reframe Parkinson’s as the body lacking dopamine in much the same way as insulin for diabetes. This is a very useful way of looking at it. In my mind it takes away the stigma and inevitability of Parkinson’s and transforms it into another battle to fight. Fight and fight every day. But there’s hope. Believe! Happy Valentine’s Day to all!
Yvette
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Dr. Laurie Mischley leads "PD summer school" August 18-23, 2019
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