The goal of treatment is to provide you with the best possible quality of life. To do this, you must learn as much as you can about PD, work with your doctor, be willing to change your life—and you must have faith.
In 40 years, I’ve evaluated 40,000 PD patients; I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t and I’ve learned to be open-minded. Sometimes, today’s “ridiculous ideas” are tomorrow’s “wonder drugs.” In 1944, when I was six, I had polio and was paralyzed from the waist down. The experts said I’d never walk again. As a child, I didn’t believe it: I did walk—I was right and the experts were wrong.
Sometimes belief, faith, and a child’s optimism trump science. As an expert, a neurologist, if I’d examined myself as a child, I too might have said I’d never walk again. Thank God for faith! Having learned to walk, although not perfectly, I graduated college and medical school, completed a rigorous and demanding internship, completed an even more rigorous and demanding neurology residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York, served in the United States Air Force, and became a professor—an “expert.”
Then, 15 years ago, the “impossible” happened and the polio came back as post-polio syndrome: a slow, relentless return of the weakness and paralysis I’d experienced 49 years earlier.
If you think defeating thoughts, you will be lost. Confront the “beast,” whether it is PD or post-polio syndrome, and learn as much as you can about it. Do not despair and never stop trying. I find comfort from the Scriptures; you may find comfort from your own faith.