At 12:57 9-8-98 -0400, Tom Riess wrote:

>Someone mentioned backwards walking when forwards results in a freeze
and I

>couldn't resist offering this as a possible explanation.

>

>Normal forward walking requires displacing one's body weight past the
fall

>point and then the advancing extremity "catches" the body before it
falls.

>If for whatever reason there is a perceived or real inability to
advance

>the leg, then fear  of falling is a very strong inhibitory force
against

>normal walking (i.e. projecting forward).


<fontfamily><param>Times New Roman</param><bigger><bigger>Tom,


After reading your mail, I tried to fit my troubles with walking in your
theory. That weird phenomenon of not being able to walk normal, but at
the same time being able to walk backwards without a problem was, nearly
14 years ago, for me  the sign that I was  seriously ill; a fact that I
had  managed to deny till then. But now, looking back  to the symptoms I
had before, they are much less weird.

My disabilities started with only being able to walk from my home to the
railway station and from another railway stattion to my workplace, by
using a few tricks. First my left leg did  seem to increase in weight
every step I made. I could overcome this temporarely by changing my
shoulder bag to my other shoulder. I could walk normally a small amount
of steps again or by taking a short pause and than starting again or to
run!!!.

Because my symptoms were so heavy, the neuro wanted, before I started to
take sinemet exclude other diseases; so I was hospitalised.  The hospital
staff was not asthonished, seeing me walking backward in the corridor.
They had seen that before and there was some joking about me using a
driving mirror. But (and this seems  to me contradictory to your theorie,
 Tom) when wallking friends, who visited, me to the door, all troubles
with walking were gone as soon as I started to walk downstairs. I could
do this quickly and relaxed. The neuro explained me that PWP's lose first
their capacity to run certain inborn programs. The turning to ones other
side in bed is normally ruled by such an inborn program  Normal walking
has of course to be learned, but the program is in our brain inborn and
the only thing we have to learn is to use this program, so he said.

So, the way to overcome some incapacities is making the task more
complex. While  I was writing this I got your last mail, Tom , in which
you say about the same thing. But I don't understand how this relates to
your  theory of the role of anxiety.

I have experienced the role of anxiety resulting in freezing in another
way. I had been capable to walk downstairs for years as a PWP. But later,
when  my equilibrium was deteriorating,  I started to fall occasionaly. I
had also some  near falls ( or so I experienced it) from the top of
stairs and I realised I had to be carefull walking downstairs. That made
me freeze sometimes and lose control, not only on top of stairs, but
after a real fall had happened, I had the same freezing response on top
of escalators, which I, till now, only dare to use goig down (going
upsatairs is no problem) when in company of someone who protects me
against falling.

About the same thing happened in the mountains. The first years after I
was diagnosed, I could miraculously walk on the steep footpaths, but the
same deteroration of my equilibrium made me insecure and after a near
fall, in which I could manage  to redirect myself to the rocks and not
down into a deep precipice, I froze when walking on  paths, from which a
fall would be the end and so it was becoming really dangerous  This seems
the same mechanism that you suppose  to be active in the disability to
walk normally in the sense that we can't walk because the execution of
the act causes fear and that causes freezing. The way I experience it,
(but by that it is of course not proven  to be true), is that not being
able to walk without leva-dopa is a coordination disturbance, just as not
being able to peel a potato.

Regards,

Ida Kamphuis</bigger></bigger></fontfamily>



--------------------------------------------------------------

Vriendelijke Groeten / Kind regards,


Ida Kamphuis                            mailto: [log in to unmask]