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i have found it extremely helpful, informative and enlightening to read the studies themselves. the most important thing i have discovered is that you simply cannot believe what this or that person says, even if s/he is a scientist - there is a possibility that what they say will be confirmed by what you read, but quite frequently one finds a troubling disparity. entrez pubmed is a good place to start - search on Parkinson's and embryonic stem cells. Take the gambling studies for example - 95% of the subjects in *all* of the gambling studies were on levodopa, too - but did it say that in any of the publicity? And take Joe Jankovic, for example. Very well respected neurologist. Quoted on the Baylor website as saying the ELLDOPA study proved that levodopa was safe and *not toxic.* However, if you read the study yourself you will find that it says the results regarding levodopa's toxicity are inconclusive. AND jankovic himself, in an article published in Movement Disorder Journal in April of 2005, just two months after the Baylor article was posted online, says the results of the ELLDOPA study regarding levodopa toxicity were inconclusive. and if you wanted to go one layer deeper, you could read the ELLDOPA study and find out that they chose the shortest possible washout period and for some reason it didn't occur to them until after the results were seen to be conflicting that the washout period might have been too short - um, how is that possible? For the record, neither Jankovic nor the communicatiions person at Baylor Medical College has responded to my emails requesting clarification of the discrepancy. Basically, listen to people you think are knowledgable and honest, but don't believe what they say until you check it out yourself - i am quite serious about this. Mary Ann Ryan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > the "neurologist" of whom you speak was a neurosurgeon, not an MDS > movement > disorder specialist. ....who knew much, much more about the neurophysiology of PD than any of us. He's gone and I'm not happy about it. He was essentially driven from this list. > > As for embryonic stem cell implants for PD I didn't think there were any > yet, only animal studies. A fetal cell experiment had disastrous results. > Dennis Turner's PD has returned after Dr. Levesque used his own adult > brain > cells, so I agree, cell replacement may not necessarily be the answer. > But > hESCR is needed according to most scientists to learn the etiology(causes) > of disease, surely a precursor to treatment. of PD and other diseases. > All > kinds of SCR, knowledge and honesty are needed in this fight. Ray After the disaster with Haun's experiments in Korea, a comment was made by a scientist in the field that stem cell hype has been over-blown so that research money could obtained. Stem cells will do nothing for Alzheimers disease, for instance and will therefore probably have no effect on advanced PD. ---------- Mary Ann -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 268.0.0/268 - Release Date: 2/23/2006 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn --------------------------------- Yahoo! Mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze.