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Since Parkinson's is a "designer disease," different for each one of us, it seems as though we should at least start with have a "designer scale," different for each of us. Each of us has some "litmus tasks" that we do - that are easy to do at some times, harder to do at others, and often quantifiable in some manner as to difficulty of performance.. We can measure ourselves by outlining these litmus tasks and plot our progress over the course of days and in the presence of different environmental variables. Now, Dr. van der Lnden, here is where the internet comes in - once we have our own "designer scale," we can share it with others. There will be some scaling items for one person that are different from the scaling items of others, some that are the same. And as we share our designer scales through the internet, each of us may pick up some points that we had missed on ourselves and change our own "designer scale." The environmental variables, which may be little more than background noise in many cases, could turn this into a multidimensional model - many causes contributing to several effects. But perhaps we now have the tools to work with the many dimensions, where we did not even several years ago. Finally some candidate for a PhD in medical research comes by, codifies the data into one scale, and becomes immortalized like Hoehn and Yahr. It might work? Art At 08:49 AM 3/8/00 , Dr. Chris van der Linden wrote: >>-snip- It would >be wondeful, considering the extensive use of the internet, that patients >should come up with suggestions to create a scale for themselves to be able >to give other fellow patients an idea on their condition and to have an idea >of the condition of the person they are "chatting" with. >Anybody interested?? > >Best regards, > >Dr. Chris van der Linden >