If people knew... what Parkinson's is.
If people knew how hard, how very hard Parkinson's can be, it would help us spread this information. Okay, not all of it, but not even vitamin B9 to control the neurotoxic homocysteine, just the right amount of vitamin B6 in 10-25 mg per day as indicated in the levodopa prospectus, or vitamin D to prevent and slow down the disease as much as possible? These are things that are as obvious as mountains that someone finds on the way. How many celebrities, how many scientists have I written to, and they haven't even answered.
If people only knew how easy it would be to help today's sick people to lead a much better life and almost stop them from getting worse: but studies are accumulating (vitamin D, vitamin C, folic acid, glutathione, magnesium, B12) and indifference, even more so.
If people knew how easy it would be to help those who are starting out, to turn their disease into something perfectly controllable (just by lowering homocysteine, restoring glutathione and providing the appropriate vitamin D - which we still don't know how much it is, due to lack of studies, but we can deduce it from existing studies: 1200 IU a day, seems like the minimum - unless the doctor's judgment is better than ours. Before taking levodopa, maybe plenty of B6 and avocado.
If people knew how easy it would be to raise awareness of people who may have a genetic predisposition or a history of dangerous events (certain drugs, brutal stress that is difficult to handle, insomnia, constipation, etc. ), with campaigns of green tea polyphenols in drinks and foods, all the B vitamins, vitamin D supplements and teaching the population to replenish vitamin D reserves by taking the sun correctly, resveratrol, vitamin C from foods and supplements, magnesium in fertilizers, information in prime time TV series, etc.
If people knew what Parkinson's was, as I do (and millions of sufferers and family members do), they would be eating nothing but carrots and tomatoes all their lives, if it were proven that it could cure Parkinson's, and if this were true and not just an illustrative and exaggerated example.
If people knew what Parkinson's was, they would not try to make money on the health of a mother who does not know how she will care for her two small children in the future, of a son who sees his father fade away, hunch over and have terrible nightmares, or of a young man who sooner than anyone should feel the beast's paw, already feels the disease lifting the walls of Cavafis or the bars of Rilke's panther cage.
And I put all this in because today we can avoid it. This was Parkinson's seen with 19th century eyes still in 2020. And not with the fresh, revolutionary vision of hundreds, thousands of studies that teach us how to "starve" the Beast and those who have given it their souls.
My dear and admired Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knew the fields and illness, exile and fear, began his great work "Gulag Archipelago" in this way that I would like to make mine for a moment:
"To all those who did not live long enough
to tell these things.
And to be forgiven
if I didn't know how to see it all,
or remember everything,
nor was I able to intuit everything."
Or the memories of the poet Ana Ahmatova in her "Requiem", of a terrifying force:
"INSTEAD OF A PROLOGUE
In the terrible years of Yezhov I stood in line
For seven months in front of Leningrad's prisons.
Once someone recognized me. Then
A woman who was behind me, with her lips
Bluebirds, who naturally had never heard my name,
He woke up from the numbness that was common to all of us
And he whispered in my ear (there we all spoke in a low voice):
-And you can describe this?
And I said:
- I can.
Then something like a smile slipped onto what had once been his face."
The tragedy that Parkinson's patients experience every day is of such magnitude as the suffering of that "Soviet" people, of whom Solzhenitsyn and Akhmatova spoke. I know what I'm talking about. They are not studies, they are experiences from then and now, some that I lived and others that I read about every day.
I insist that it doesn't have to be like that anymore. It's up to us to say: "it's over. That's enough." And to act with courage and prudence. But not a single step backwards.
In my own way and with my many limitations, I too will try to "see it all" and "describe this".
And no, however much you insist, no: two and two are not five. Neither were they in the 19th century nor will they be in the 21st. Not as long as we can avoid it.
No one can say they didn't know.
No one can say they didn't know.
