CHAPTER 1. THE AMAZING REVOLUTION IN WHICH WE LIVE... ALMOST WITHOUT
REALIZING IT YET.
"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has
come".
Victor Hugo
"The crisis occurs when the old has not yet died and the new
has not the new has not yet been born".
Bertolt Brecht
"Revolutions take place
in dead ends".
Bertolt Brecht
Difficult to perceive and overwhelming on paper:
from the union of the old and the new comes hope. The best of the East with its
incredible Ayurvedic or Chinese herbal formulas to treat Parkinson's together
with the best of the West through brain scans, the growing role of various forms
of physical exercise, of vitamins B1, B2, D3 and B12, as well as the combination
of acetyl carnitine and alpha lipoic acid to restore the mitochondria. We live
at a time when everything seems covered in dark clouds and there is great
darkness, but we also see rays of sunshine breaking through those same
depressing clouds. We are on the edge of the precipice, but there is an
accumulation of very important research and information, and changes that lead
to hope where there seems to be no reason. It is there, but it is not easy to
see it. It takes a lot of coincidences and causalities to pull back the veils.
At least that is what has happened to me over the last 30 years.
Brave
neurologists have left us videos that have the virtue of breaking through the
thick wall of current prejudices with a very powerful efficacy. This is not the
simplification of every problem out of a fit of arrogance or ignorance, but the
attentive compilation of what neurologists ahead of their time or contrary to
the dominant discourse say, only in that sense they would be "dissidents" within
the authentic orthodoxy, that of the search for the truth, such as Birkmayer,
Shults, Coimbra, Perlmutter, Costantini, Fancellu, etc.
I have learned more
about what is definitive in unravelling the mystery of Parkinson's as a
historian and digital journalist than as a son and caregiver. The testimonies,
clues and evidence are abundant. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Books, studies,
articles, news... But the thick jungle does not let us see those trees. One of
the paradoxes of the world of Parkinson's, not of the disease or its possible
treatments, is that a real revolution is taking place and that it is so
difficult to see because it is found in hundreds of studies that are not very
accessible to the public and because it is almost buried by thousands and
thousands of other studies and various news items, which in my opinion lead to
greater complexity and, therefore, to increasing confusion (subtypes of
Parkinson's, division between brain and enteric initiates, the role of
alphasynuclein, etc.). What we are interested in "here and now" is what we
already know works: antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, mitochondrial activators,
reduction of the neurotoxic homocysteine, physical exercise... Be it drugs,
supplements, herbal medicines, Indian and Chinese herbal formulas, medicinal
mushrooms, therapies, etc. Like a swarm attacking Parkinson's until it becomes
weaker and weaker... until it is expelled if possible or as far as possible.
1.
Evidence for this revolution.
In this book very radical statements are made
which seem to be based only on the author's good wishes, but I can assure you
that this is not the case. After the death of Oliver Sacks (the famous doctor in
the movie "Awakenings"), there are two really famous neurologists left in the
world: one orthodox, Stanley Fahn, who treated the boxer Muhammad Ali and the
actor Michael J Fox; and one heterodox, David Perlmutter, the famous author of
the most impressive videos in Parkinson's History showing the "miraculous"
recovery of several patients almost unable to move and speak thanks to the use
of intravenous glutathione (and strong doses of the main B vitamins that were
part of the preparatory protocol, which would explain why glutathione has not
been so effective in later studies). We should not forget the healing potency of
Costantini's B1, Coimbra's B2, Birkmayer's NADH/B3, Christine and McCarter's
B12, etc.). We are talking about neurologists. I insist on this "detail". We are
talking about another way of looking at Medicine and Neurology. This is part of
the revolution... But not only David Perlmutter, but also the Brazilian
neurology professor and neurologist Coimbra, the Italian neurologists Costantini
and Fancellu, the Argentinean Villafañe with the nicotine patches until they
closed his practice at the Henri Mondor Hospital in Paris, and a very long
etcetera. Wise men who have passed away, such as the great Walter Birkmayer,
other younger ones who move on the frontiers of what we know, such as Borah,
Aoyama, Mischley, Espay, Villafañe, Monti... It is a mystery how a real
revolution can have developed in the last decade on the role of scientific
studies and how almost nothing has reached the majority of patients and their
families or the clinical practice in the daily private and public consultations
of neurologists. Some examples are: Alberts (2011), forced physical exercise on
a bicycle (in tandem with a healthy person), produces a physical benefit of
35-40 %, like a dose of levodopa; Suzuki (2013), vitamin D3 can slow the disease
(at 1200 IU daily for one year, UPDRS scale); Phillipson (2013), with a
combination of supplements and regular medication one patient got his symptoms
under control; Schaffner (2019), vitamin B12 is able to silence (epigenetically)
the main gene of so-called familial or genetic Parkinson's: LRRK2. Monti (2019),
with the use of oral and parenteral NAC (N-acetylcysteine), a precursor of vital
and scarce glutathione in Parkinson's patients, increases dopamine receptors and
significantly improves motor symptoms; Fullard (2020), vitamin D3 affects and
ameliorates almost everything in Parkinson's disease. In 20 minutes on the
beach, the body synthesises between 10,000 and 25,000 IU of vitamin D3.
2. The
revolution in the world of Parkinson's.
I write this simply as my father's son
and carer until his death in 2012. Since then as a searcher and disseminator of
everything I "rediscover" in books and study databases, thanks to Google and
Pubmed. The first alarm signal was when I found a specialised manual on
dyskinesias in Parkinson's and it did not even mention pyridoxine or vitamin B6,
despite the studies by Sandyk 1990 or Lerner 2007 and 2015, etc. An article by
Chilean neurologists Juri and Chaa in 2006 put me on the track. I don't even
mention nicotine or melatonin. You can see that this is orthodoxy, but orthodoxy
that has been forgotten or marginalised. But it was also happening to me on the
CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) side. One of the most famous books
on food and health did not even mention Parkinson's (or Alzheimer's either). And
when my father was still alive, we desperately consulted an expert in
alternative medicines (it would be 2010) and he confessed to us with great
honesty that he knew very little, that there was hardly anything. He recommended
alpha lipoic acid and a type of spinal massage. When one visits many sites on
the internet on both sides, confusion increases, because strange therapies
abound, very difficult to carry out and generally very expensive. Not a word
about homocysteine, vitamin C (essential for tyrosine, carnitine, to enter the
brain as its oxidised form and to be brought back to life (as an antioxidant) by
glutathione or NADH, to recycle glutathione, to activate B9 against
homocysteine, etc. ), NAC as a way to raise glutathione (which plummets to a
catastrophic 2 % in the most advanced stage of the disease), milk thistle to
help the overburdened liver in those sick from medication, etc.
3. The end of
Parkinson's as we have seen it so far.
And the revolution we have been living
through for some years now is reflected in very hopeful changes, some of which
have already been mentioned: - adult neurogenesis is possible (between Ramón y
Cajal's Nobel publication in 1928 and Erikson's study in 1998, adult
neurogenesis was thought to be impossible). - GABA could be as important as
dopamine in Parkinson's disease (Sabatini 2012, Sulzer 2015). The*** same enzyme
that transforms dopa into dopamine transforms tryptophan into serotonin or GABA.
- Epigenetics comes to rescue us from the fear of genes, from the heavy burden
of genetics. Genes do not have the last word. Vitamin B12 controls the main gene
for hereditary Parkinson's, LRRK2 (Schaffner 2019). Vitamin D acts on more than
2000 genes known so far, magnesium is so important in gene regulation that
Piovesan speaks of a "magnesome". We should not forget the pioneering twin
studies by Tanner and Maher, both in 2002... - the neurons of the "sustantina
nigra pars compacta" (SNpc) that we thought were dead, could be largely dormant
or "deactivated" (Heo 2020); - dangerous homocysteine, elevated in Parkinson's
patients and more so in those taking levodopa, could trigger alpha-synuclein
aberration (Enomoto 2019); - a different vision is advanced with the use of
nutraceuticals to "starve" Parkinson's (Lama 2020); We already know enough about
the disease (although much needs to be clarified and more studies are needed)
and about treatments (a synthetic levodopa could be used, adding the compounds
that make Mucuna pruriens infinitely superior; or Mucuna with carbidopa or
benserazide, together with new MAO inhibitors of plant origin; studies on
nutrition, vitamins such as the forgotten B1, B2 and B3, which seem to be
marginalised). What holds the Parkinson's world back is the way the Parkinson's
world itself has developed in recent decades. Its dimensions, the economic
interests at stake (patents, profits, careers) are factors that can distort the
free action of research towards curing the disease. Most of the time
unconsciously, dragged along by the mainstream.
The challenge is not easy.