Frequently Asked Questions
How long will it take for me to recover?
This question is impossible to answer without patient evaluation, but several factors appear to play a part in determining speed of recovery: age, severity of symptoms, number of blockages, correct diagnosis, and attitude.
This is the most frequently asked question. It is impossible to answer. Every person is unique and may or may not respond to treatment in a manner similar to the average.
However, some trends and generalizations are possible. It appears that the following factors can be of significance:
- correct diagnosis
- age
- severity of symptoms
- number of blockages
- attitude
Correct Diagnosis: Let me address this factor first, so as to eliminate a group of people who should not be in this program at all. Nearly thirty percent of the people who come to our clinic have been given a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease even though they do not manifest any or enough of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease to qualify for this diagnosis according to western medical standards.
The most common error is for a well-meaning MD to insist that anyone with a tremor has Parkinson's. We see many other errors as well. On the other hand, misdiagnosis cuts both ways; we do see people with Parkinson's who have incorrectly been given a diagnosis of depression (due to lack of facial expression), essential tremor, or pinched nerve in the neck (due to lack of arm swing), when a more astute MD would have given a diagnosis of PD.
The problem with an incorrect diagnosis, such as a diagnosis of depression, is that the drugs that most MD's prescribe for depression can cause drug-induced parkinsonism. If you think this might be you, please read the drug insert list of adverse effects you're your anti-depression medications. If this list of adverse effects includes tremor, slowness, depression - yes, most anti-depressants (including alcohol), will, over the long haul, increase depression rather than decreasing it - then it is likely that your anti-anxiety or anti-depression drug (the tricyclics and SSRIs in particular, but any drug that increases seratonin or norepinephrine will behave this way) is one of the ones that is known to cause drug-induced parkinsonism. If a person already has subclinical PD, and takes these drugs, he may well accelerate the development of the PD symptoms by causing permanent, drug-induced brain changes to accompany the treatable, naturally occurring brain dormancy that causes some of the symptoms of idiopathic Parkinson's disease. Therefore, if you have been given an incorrect diagnosis - being diagnosed with depression when actually the diagnosis should have been early Parkinson's disease - and have therefore taken drugs which cause brain changes, you may not receive maximum benefit from this program even though you are not taking anti-parkinson's medications. (We do not recommend this program for anyone taking anti-parkinson's medications. Please read the free book about Medications of Parkinson's Disease, available on this website.)
You may well be able to reverse the pattern that caused your initial presenting symptoms and your Parkinson's disease, but the irreversible brain damage caused by the drugs might not be treatable. In other words, we may be able to turn off the system that was causing the advancing Parkinson's disease, but we will not be able to help you with the drug-induced tremor (which can have a delayed onset, beginning years after the drug has been discontinued. Please research the phenomenon called Tardive Dyskinesia. (The word Tardive means that the symptom occurs "late", often long after the drug was taken.) Other PD-like symptoms, including slowness of movement, speech, and thinking, can be symptoms that are the normal, permanent side effects of most the anti-anxiety and anti-depression drugs.
Finally, bear in mind that every person is unique and may or may not respond to treatment in a manner similar to the average.
Age : Age is a major factor in determining rate of recovery. Young onset PDers, if their PD is diagnosed promptly, as soon as the slightest symptoms are starting to appear, have the best chance at a speedy recovery. By speedy, I mean a year or two. However, because most MDs will not consider a diagnosis of PD in a young person, most young people who see their doctor for early symptoms of PD will not be correctly diagnosed. Also, some doctors, not liking to cause anguish in a young person, and knowing that the drugs for PD have only a brief effective span, may not want to give this demoralizing diagnosis, and may choose to wait until more symptoms appear before making a conclusion. Although a young person usually presents more than one site of blockage (hence the earlier onset of symptoms) and each blockage might take a considerable amount of time to heal (months or years), still, the pace of physiological recovery (cell growth and renewal) is much, much faster in a younger person. Cellular repair occurs more slowly with every passing decade. The slowdown of cellular repair work over the decades does not appear to be a question of nutrition (supplements do not seem to make much of a difference), but is a simple question of the cellular programming. Once the blockages are gone, young people recover the most quickly.
At the other end of the age continuum, a person over seventy years of age will have a slow time of recovery. Slow, in this case, could mean anywhere from two years to six, or even longer. Do not fall into the usual mistake of saying "I am different from other seventy-year olds - I am an athlete, I have all my mental faculties, and I am stronger, faster, and have more will-to-win than anyone my age." This attitude/thinking is normal for PDers, and is a part of the pathology. PDers, because of their reliance on adrenaline instead of dopamine during those decades while the PD was subclinical, have usually been stronger, harder, faster, smarter, with greater-than-normal self-control than other, non-PD people. These attributes, highly rated by most PDers, are actually symptoms of their illness. Dynamic behavior, for a pre-PDer, is pure routine. So don't imagine that you are any different from the other seventy-year old PDers. You may have been different from all your non-PD peers, but in the ranks of PDers, your seeming differences from the "ordinary man," even rare superiorities, are the rule rather than the exception.
It will take you years, maybe many, many years, to reverse the patterns that you have cultivated in your body. Even if those patterns reverse quickly, say, in a matter of months, you will still need to regrow tissue throughout most of your body. You will be needing to regrow muscle, nerve, and brain connections. Cell growth occurs more slowly in older people. You may have been more determined and more feisty than anyone else your age, but your cells are still growing much more slowly than they were when you were a child. Also, once the PD has been turned off, you will no longer be stronger, harder, faster, and your much treasured will-power will be gone or at least greatly reduced, along with your other Parkinson's pathologies.In terms of will power, speed, and drive, you will be much closer to "normal, a thing that many PDers have disdained, if not dreaded.
This leads one to the question - if it is going to take so long, why should I bother? Why not just take the drugs? The answer is, maybe you should just take the drugs. Be aware that the drugs wane in effectiveness within two to five years, and within five years the side effects of the drugs usually begin to be more tortuous than the PD, as well as no longer effective for masking the PD symptoms. In other words, although the drugs may be wonderful at first, within five years, certainly within ten, the drugs will only be working sporadically, if at all, and one may have side effects such as violent, painful spasming, painful freezing (immobility episodes caused by the drugs, not the PD), extreme insomnia, hallucinations, painful burning in the mouth, twisting distortions of the limbs (dystonias), loss of mental focus, and heart arrhythmias, plus the Parkinson's disease will have accelerated because of drug use, so that the PD will be much, much worse if one then stops taking the drugs at that point than if one had never taken them at all. In other words, the drugs really are not an answer if you are young and planning to live more than five years. However, there are two sides to every coin. Some quite elderly patients have come to our clinic hoping for a cure from their Parkinson's disease, and we have suggested that they not join our program, but instead, work with their neurologist and follow his suggestions for a traditional, drug-based treatment of their symptoms.
I will give an example: A seventy five year old patient saw me for the first time. He walked extremely slowly, he had hunched posture characteristic of PD, his arms did not swing, his feet shuffled, he was drooling, with an expressionless face, and he was tremoring. His wife had made the appointment. She was keen for him to get into the recovery program. She assured me on the phone that he was a good candidate because "he was only diagnosed last month."
I asked her how long he had been walking with a shuffle. She guessed about fifteen years; it had been fifteen years earlier he had stopped golfing - his passion - because his arms and legs didn't work right anymore. I asked about his facial expression. She said it had been that way at least a decade. His life work had been in sales, and towards the end he wasn't able to smile at customers - that was a problem! I asked for more details about his use of his arms, and she laughed that she had been making fun of him for over fifteen years - she remembered when it started - because he held his fork in such a funny way and got food to his mouth like a robot: rigid, large movements with no finesse.
I suggested that he actually had advanced Parkinson's disease. He had been suffering obvious symptoms of PD for nearly fifteen years, according to her telling. She became fairly huffy, and insisted that he only got Parkinson's disease a month ago. She had noticed his hand shaking many months earlier and made an appointment with the doctor. At the eventual doctor visit, just the month before they came to my office, the doctor had announced a diagnosis of PD. Therefore, this wife could not understand why I imagined that her husband had had PD for years - he had only gotten the diagnosis a month ago, and why couldn't I understand that? So I decided to ignore the wife altogether.
I turned to the patient, who had not said a word during the intake, and asked him how he was feeling. He intoned, slowly, with difficulty, "I am seventy-five…in my family, we die in our early seventies. I've already lived longer than I was supposed to. I'm content. I've had a good life. I'm ready to go."
I suggested that they not get started in our program. I explained that it might take years. The wife was insistent that they begin at once. I asked if they had read the Patient Handbook. She said they had. I asked what care facility they would use when her husband got into the weak/ helpless/sleeping-all-day stage, considering that she appeared too frail to be able to carry him to the bathroom or turn him over in bed. She appeared shocked. "Why would he be weak if he's getting better?" she demanded. I asked her again if she had read the Patient Handbook. She became flustered and claimed that she had been too busy to read it, and so she had asked her husband to read it, and he must have forgotten to tell her that there might be difficult times. I asked him if he wanted to start this program. He slowly repeated that he had had a good life, and he was ready to go.
In a case like this, the patient might find that anti-parkinson's medications, used judiciously, conforming to the manufacturers instructions, rather than using them in the bold, almost cavalier dosing that I have seen invented by some neurologists, would give him more movement, more rapid speech, more fluidity, less depression, and might ease the next few years of his life. I asked him to work with his neurologist, and to keep in mind that many scientists feel that, in order to delay the time when the drugs no longer work, the powerful, brain-altering PD drugs should be taken at the lowest effective level, aiming for a slight increase in functionality, rather than taking as much as possible to get the best possible physical functioning.
For you clever readers out there who are noting that the above patient does not match the description that I just gave of stronger, harder, faster, smarter, please keep in mind that this man had been having strong symptoms of PD, to the extent that he had quit his job, quit sports, and had been barely able to feed himself for fifteen years. I did speak more with his wife and learned that he had been a very dynamic, very intense and successful athlete and salesman bursting with positive attitude until he had started "slowing down," after which, his dynamic seemed to slowly wind down. Also, for you readers who are debating whether or not to get into this program or use the drugs, note that he had been dealing with symptoms of PD for fifteen years. He had made many changes in his lifestyle to accommodate his decreasing mobility, but, and follow me closely here - he was still able to move, feed himself, and talk. He did these things slowly, but he could do them, and he was not having violent freezing, spasming, agonizing torsion of the limbs, loss of mental focus, or any of the other drug-related symptoms. I have never seen a patient who has taken antiparkinson's drugs for fifteen years who could think clearly, let alone function with any degree of predictability. This man, though not moving quickly, was still functional - he would not have been had he started taking anti-parkinson's drugs fifteen year earlier when his symptoms first appeared.
To continue the question of age, what is the prognosis in our program for a person who is in his fifties or sixties? This will depend on severity of symptoms, but such a person might be clearly showing changes that correspond to recovering from PD within a year. On the other hand, I have had patients in their forties who spend years struggling with the weakness stage that occurs after the PD symptoms are gone. (This limp, weak stage is when people are usually told by their doctors, "Maybe you were misdiagnosed. I think you don't actually have PD. Maybe it's Multiple System Atrophy.") Again, so much depends upon how bad the symptoms actually were when they got into the recovery program. I have had several patients who have been angry with me because they are taking "too long" to recover.
One patient, age 45, started with me two years after he was diagnosed. To get into the program, he told us that he had been recently diagnosed, and only recently been having symptoms. Six months into the program he admitted that he had been tremoring since his late twenties, but he could "control it" until two years ago, so it didn't count (?). His other symptoms had been present for over ten years, but he had kept them at bay through sheer will power and by running at least fifteen miles a day. He said the running loosened up his encroaching rigidity although, in the last few years, even running fifteen miles was no longer enough to create the endorphin high which propelled him into mobility for the rest of the day. He had not told us about those twenty years of tremor and ten years of problems with severe rigidity. When he started with me he was certain that he would recover quickly because he had "only had Parkinson's disease for two years", and he was young.
As far as I can tell, now that I finally have the facts about his history, he's had symptoms of PD for over twenty years, and was a case of advanced Parkinson's. His body was ghastly. His ankles and feet were cadaverous gray with no sign of life in them, purplish-gray, and he had no feeling from the knees down. His toes were gnarled and rotten, with decaying flesh adhering under his twisted, fungus-filled (common in PD) toenails. His hands were perfectly rigid, he could not separate his fingers from one another. His hunched posture was so severe that the curve of the back of his neck was utterly reversed, convex instead of concave. His skin was grayish-purplish, cold, and unresponsive to touch. Again, he was adamant that he would recover quickly because he'd "only had PD for two years."
This patient had taken a dopamine agonist for a year, and had switched to an MAO inhibitor "at the lowest possible dose" for the six months before starting in our program. At the time he entered our program he said he had only taken drugs for "a short while." He insisted that the very brief experience with the drugs wouldn't have done him any damage. (We have learned that anything longer than two weeks to three months (depending on drug and dosage) has a detrimental effect, and appears to cause irreversible damage.) Finally, he was certain that his capability for mind-over-matter and his tremendous athleticism would carry him through to an early recovery.
I accepted him into the program, (with misgivings, due to his drug use), and when he quit the drugs he was shocked at the emotional and physical tailspin he went into. He was also alarmed when first began to experience the searing pain and heat when blood and nerves returned to his corpse-like feet. In fact, he went to a hospital's emergency room. The emergency room MD told him to take L-dopa, and discharged him. The pain lasted for months. Six months later, the agonizing pain ceased in his feet, and his feet began to function normally. However, soon after his feet healed, he began having sensation in his numbed hands. The burning pain appeared in one hand. Eventually it spread to the other hand. He went to the emergency room again and they told him not to come again. At this point, a year and a half after he started treatment, his feet had normal color and feeling, and his fingers were beginning to flex. Six months later, his distorted neck started to have non-stop, burning pain that prevented sleep.
Now, at the time of this writing, he has been in the program over two years. He is extremely weak, but he is much less rigid. He can even move his head from side to side and has had some days when he can turn himself over in bed. He can feed himself, and his facial expression has returned. I can make no guess at this time how much longer it will be. He feels betrayed because he was "recently misdiagnosed" and should be recovering faster. My feeling is that he had severe symptoms for twenty years and he is fortunate to have recovered as quickly as he has, even though he is still extremely weak.
On the other hand, to demonstrate the ideal combination of early diagnosis and youth, I had a patient in his early twenties whose initial symptoms were rigidity and increasing slowness in his arms. A professional musician, he could no longer play trombone due to rigidity in his arm. He was just starting to have pill-rolling tremoring in one hand, now and then. His gait was only mildly affected in one foot and hip. He had some mild numbness in his facial muscles and his sense of smell had been gone for some time. His posture was slightly hunched forward and when he straightened, it quickly hunched forward again. He had cogwheeling in his wrists and ankles. He came to my office for the arm rigidity. He had not seen a neurologist. I asked a series of questions which suggested to me that his symptoms seemed to be accelerating in the direction of Parkinson's disease. I checked the currents in his legs and they were running backwards along the Stomach channel. I never mentioned the words "Parkinson's disease," but started treating him for PD. Unprompted by knowledge of his diagnosis or by reading the Recovery Handbook, he still had nearly all of the recovery symptoms, such as fatigue, head symptoms, recovery dyskinesia, and pain in his feet. His symptoms, including loss of smell, were gone in three months. I cannot know if it was only his young age and prompt diagnosis that was responsible for his rapid recovery; I also had to wonder to what extant his ignorance of a PD diagnosis was a factor in his rapid recovery. Here is another example to make this point.
A male, age 48, was sent to my private practice by his wife who felt "something was wrong." I noticed during intake that his voice was choky-sounding and unnaturally high pitched, similar that that of many of my PD patients. His neck was pulled forward in the typical PD manner. He was carrying his arms in the bent-elbow position typical in PD. In response to my pointed questions he replied noted that his stride was changing, becoming shorter and clumsier - he had sprained his ankle several times recently. His handwriting (left hand) was rapidly worsening. His posture was becoming difficult to maintain - he would consciously stand up straight, and then, a minute later, would realize he was leaning forward again. He was an athlete, and he was noticing that he was more clumsy than he had been - he attributed this to aging. He was feeling more agitated lately, more restless. He was starting to have trouble sleeping. He had very poor sense of smell and taste. In my exam I noticed cogwheeling in his left ankle and wrist. His response to a finger-tap test of the left hand showed a characteristic slowing down of the tap after several seconds. He had severe toenail fungus on the left foot. I did not tell him what I suspected, but instead starting treating his left foot, which had a history of injury.
The injury began healing within a matter of weeks, and in three months his major symptoms were gone. I stopped seeing him except for a few visits over the last two years: once for mild flu and again for a newly sprained ankle (won during a softball game.) Though he was no longer receiving treatments for Parkinson's, I noticed with pleasure that his voice has begun to fill out and his handwriting is improving. When I started working with him I had warned him that he might be very tired for a few days as his body healed from the foot injury, and that he might even need to miss a few days work. He was tired and weak for several weeks, but found that he was able to catch up on sleep on the weekends, and did not miss any work. Two years later, none of his obvious symptoms have returned and his more subtle symptoms are also evaporating.
Unlike my patients who have been told by a neurologist that they have an incurable illness, he has no concerns at all about his symptoms returning. Why should he? I never told him of my suspected diagnosis. I have had several other similar cases in which the patient had many or most of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, although not severe enough to warrant a visit to the neurologist. I never tell them that the Rebellious Stomach Channel Qi that appears to be the source of their problems also goes by the western medical name of "incurable Parkinson's disease." This is not because I want to be secretive, it is because the name "incurable Parkinson's disease" is a wrong name, a devestating, misleading name with serious implications and repercussions. I have found that these patients who do not receive an official diagnosis of Parkinsons do much better than those patients who have been officially diagnosed following their recovery: they recover much more quickly and they accept the temporary weakness and fatigue as indications of change rather than a worsening of the "degenerative, incurable Parkinson's." I do verbally explain some of the changes that they might experience during their healing but I never say the words Parkinson's disease. Nor do I give them any printed literature to help them anticipate some of the likely recovery symptoms; after all, if I asked them to read a book called Recovering From Parkinson's, A Patient's Handbook, they might understandably be concerned. And they therefore do not indulge in the hypochondria and fear about returning symptoms that is typical for those recovered patients who had received an "official" diagnosis prior to recovering.
Compare this with former PDers who might have had no symptoms for several years after recovering, but who report back to me regularly, every time they have a flu or get a cramp in their leg - they are dead certain that the PD has suddenly returned.
In summary, what is a normal time frame for recovery according to the age factor? Here are some more examples: A male, age early fifties, with advanced Parkinson's, was, against all odds, completely recovered in one year. A woman, age 52, promptly diagnosed with budding Parkinson's, was recovered from all her PD symptoms within two years, although she was still having severe pain in her hip - one of her childhood injury sites that became painful during the course of treatment. A male who began treatment at age 67 who had been diagnosed with PD nearly twenty years (twenty!!) earlier, who recovered from his PD symptoms within three years is still, five years after starting treatment, spending most of his day napping and sleeps all night long. He only wakes for meals and to use the bathroom. (He had never slept in the daytime prior to recovering.) Although his tremor is gone, his facial expression has been restored and he has increased flexibility, and since getting off his PD medications he no longer has On and Off periods, still it is doubtful that his body will regenerate enough muscle tissue so that he can ever be vigorous again. His legs, once rigid, are now feeble, and he may always need help to get up out of a chair. When he started treatment he, typically for medicated patients, appeared more vigorous than many people his own age. After recovering and getting off his medications, he appeared to have suddenly aged. His looked like an exhausted old man, which he was. This is typical of recovery - once the driving force that sets the Parkinson's in motion is turned off, the body begins to look like what is it - its actual age, combined with the ravages inflicted by decades of a masked illness. So how large a part does age play in determining the pace of recovery? It varies from person to person. Age alone is obviously not the only significant factor, but it can be an important consideration. And yet, every person is unique and may or may not respond to treatment in a manner similar to the average.
Number of Blockages: I have patients who have one, significant injury on the foot. I have others whose bodies are a mass of injuries. I have one extreme-sports loving patient who has had several broken bones and ankles, knee injuries, shoulder injuries, neck injuries, and multiple concussions. It seems that every time one part of her body starts to heal, the remaining, extant injuries create a new pattern of electrical irregularities, so that her PD symptoms never really cease, they just keep changing from one limb to another, or one dominant symptom to another. She has been in the program for four years and we are still discovering new sites on her body where the energy flow is chaotic. Very often, these sites correspond to scar tissue for which she has no recall whatsoever. While many of these injuries, by themselves, might be inadequate to set in motion the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, now that the irregular Qi flow pattern has been established, these multiple injury sites appear to be pockets of resistance to correct energy flow. Some of her symptoms have changed in response to treatment, and new symptoms have appeared. In her case, it appears that she will not have conclusive recovery symptoms until we track down and treat all or most of her injury sites. In some patients, when the foot injury begins to heal, other blockages in the body, whether or not they have been physically addressed using Tui Na or emotionally addressed via memory, will spontaneously begin to heal. They make their presence known by bruising, tenderness, or any of the symptoms that an injury might present. In these cases, it is not necessary to track down every single injury - simply getting one injury to heal is enough to initiate the body-wide healing process.
In terms of blockages, every person is unique and may or may not respond to treatment in a manner similar to the average.
Severity of symptoms: the more PD symptoms and/or the more severe the symptoms, the more repair work the body has to do. Many people want to determine the severity of their symptoms by assuming that the PD only started on the day of diagnosis, and that, if their diagnosis was recent, their symptoms must be mild. It is ludicrous to base the severity of the PD on the date of diagnosis. A person must make an honest analysis of all symptoms, which might include constipation, insomnia, poor handwriting, tremor, rolled-forward shoulders, loss of sense of smell, being asked "What's the matter? Why aren't you smiling?" or "What? I can't hear you…", or needing to use the handrail going up and down stairs in addition to the classic symptoms of festinating gait, poor balance, tremor, slowness and rigidity, and try to recall when these symptoms very first appeared. If they appeared in the last few weeks, then the symptoms are fairly new. If the symptoms appeared decades ago, even if they could be masked or you could force yourself to overcome them, you still had symptoms. The length of time that you have had symptoms, as well as the severity of the symptoms, will effect the length of time of your treatment program. Still, every person is unique and may or may not respond to treatment in a manner similar to the average.
Attitude : Last of all, attitude. Nearly everyone thinks that the proper attitude is The Will To Win. This is not correct. Most people with PD have had The Will To Win for a lifetime, and usually to a greater extent than people who don't have PD. The extreme Will-To-Win, together with a ferocious degree of self-control and ability to separate mind from body (also called Mind-over-Matter) is a part of the pathology of PD, and not a part of the cure. Most PDers have a pathologically high level of "Mind over Matter" or "I'd Rather Do It Myself. These attitudes are not particularly helpful in responding to the massage therapy used in treating Parkinson's. In fact, these attitudes often edge towards the distinctly unhelpful mental posture of "I won't let anyone help me" and even "I must mentally resist any help that comes from others."
The attitude that seems to best predict a rapid recovery from Parkinson's is just the opposite: humility. Those patients who have done the best in this program and recovered the most quickly have entered the program with an attitude that might be paraphrased like this: "I am curious about this illness. I wonder at the extent to which my rather extreme level of self-control, wariness, intelligence, and capability, might have contributed to this illness. The humiliating symptoms of this illness have shown me that my previous attitude of indominable self-reliance may have been a tad arrogant, if not wildly unrealistic. My old way of life was successful in the eyes of the world, but deep inside, I was always pretending - even to myself - that I was staunchly unaffected by emotional blows. I was always wary of the capabilities and even the bona fides of others. It's almost as if the rigidity of my body is a manifestation of my emotional inflexibility, the tremor is the fear that I've always carried around inside, and the slowness is the deceleration of my highly productive life, a deceleration I've been craving but would never allow myself. I'm ready to change. Finally, I hope what you (the PD Team) learn by working with me will serve to help others like myself - and I used to imagine that there were no people like myself."
Those patients who have made the fastest recoveries have been the ones that have entered the program saying, "Whatever I've been doing all my life hasn't worked in the long run. I thought I would always be able to command my body, but now I have Parkinson's disease. It's time for a change..." Those who enter the program claiming (again, this is a paraphrase), "I've always been an athlete (or genius, brilliant doctor, hero, supersuccessful business man, or such), I can't wait to get back into sports (or business or heroics or whatever), it's who I am, it's what I live for. I just want to get rid of this Parkinson's so that I can be myself again!" tend to have a very difficult time with the recovery. They have a hard time understanding that their superior performance was intrinsically linked with the underlying, subclinical Parkinson's that has been building inside for most of their life. When the Parkinson's is gone, the abnormal, fear-driven need to succeed will also be gone. This is not to say that drive and intensity are abnormal - but these qualities should well up out of a sense of well-being and wisdom, rather than having their roots in fear, wary cleverness, or denial of injury.
Some PDers bristle at the idea that it was their overactive sympathetic nervous system that caused their brilliance, in addition to eventually causing their Parkinson's disease. They imagine that if their health practitioner does a good quick job, they will be able to return to their life of crypto fear- and crypto pain-driven excellence. These people have a much harder time during the treatment process, accepting the slow, boring ministrations of the health practitioner that will allow their own body to find the damaged areas inside and begin their own healing.
Summary
So, to determine just how long it might take you to recover, you must consider your age (rate of cell replacement, which slows with age, slowing dramatically after age sixty or so), the severity of your symptoms (not your date of diagnosis), the number of injuries you might have (did you lead a vigorous or even reckless lifestyle that caused multiple injuries), whether or not you have done yourself a permanent mischief by taking psychotropic/psychoactive drugs, whether or not you actually have Parkinson's disease or only have a drug-induced parkinsonism (or something else altogether, there is much misdiagnosis in this field), and finally, if you truly are ready to become someone different from the person you've been practicing and preparing to be all these years. That person, the person you have been preparing to be, is exactly what you are: a person with Parkinson's disease. If you are ready to become a person who doesn't have Parkinson's disease you will need to let go of your wall of emotional protection around your foot injury site. You may need to allow your true, good self rather than your fear-driven traits to have a turn at the helm. Also, as with all things medical, every person is unique and may or may not respond to treatment in a manner similar to the average.
To the question of "how long will it take me to recover?" I offer this prognosis: sometime between nine months and several lifetimes.
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