Updates
July 1, 2007: An entirely new version of Recovery From Parkinson’s Disease is being posted on this site as of July 2007. New research in 2006 and 2007 has led to a completely new version of our book about treating Parkinson’s Disease using theory and techniques of Asian medicine.
The prior update, a sixth edition of Recovery From Parkinson’s; A Practitioner’s Handbook was never actually completed because of new findings that were occurring even as the sixth edition was being written. For more information about the new material, please visit this page.
The Parkinson's Recovery Project
The Parkinson's Recovery Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to disseminating information about treatments of Parkinson's disease using modalities of Oriental medicine. An new explanation for the underlying cause of Parkinson's disease, based on acupuncture channel theory, has arisen through our research. This explanation suggests that a correctable electrical disarray set in motion by an injury, rather than the current western medicine explanation of "spontaneous" cellular insufficiency/cell death, is the causative agent in the neurological and dopamine-related changes that are seen in idiopathic Parkinson's. The primary method of disseminating the results of our research is this website: our books are available for free download at the publications page of this website.
Since 1998, our organization has also sponsored several Parkinson's-related projects: small research projects in which people with Parkinson's have been treated for free; classes that teach the techniques we've used in treating Parkinson's; free publications (via this website), free technical support for health practitioners via email, and, whenever possible, a free clinic for treating people with Parkinson's disease. The clinic has been offered as part of the teaching curriculum at Five Branches Institute college of Traditional Chinese Medicine, in Santa Cruz, California.
Many people with Parkinson's disease who have been in our program have experienced symptoms consistent with recovery from Parkinson's. Because Parkinson's is officially described as "incurable," those people who appear to have recovered in response to our treatments have automatically been told by their doctors that they must have been "misdiagnosed." Despite this semantic wrangling, we feel that our program may hold an important key to the effective treatment of Parkinson's disease. While it may take more than twenty years (the norm for paradigm-shifting research) before our findings are accepted, we feel that this information may be significant and therefore wish to make it available to the general public.
The project leader is Janice Walton-Hadlock,
LAc, a teacher at Five Branches Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine
in Santa Cruz.
Her writings, describing various aspects of our research in this field,
have been published as articles in numerous peer-reviewed acupuncture
journals. Her larger works, a book about the theory, cause, and treatment
of Parkinson's and a book about antiparkinson's medications, are published
by the Parkinson's Recovery Project and available on this website.
Her entry into publication in western medical journals is very recent;
her rebuttal to a New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) 2004 article
on antiparkinson's medication, based on her four-year study of antiparkinson's
medications, was published in the March 31, 2005 issue of the NEJM.
Dear reader: we do prefer the use of the more modern label, "Asian medicine" instead of "Oriental medicine." However, we have found that most people, when doing an on-line search, use the antiquated term. Therefore, we are using the word "Oriental" as well as "Asian" on this page to ensure that our information can get to as many people as possible who are searching on the web. We apologize to anyone who may be offended at our wording.