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FYI, I've been taking Tai Chi, and find it helpful. If nothing else, it's very portable, and something you can do anywhere. A friend in my class, who happens to have MS, and I are thinking of trying Kung Fu now too. It's a little more aggressive, but not nearly so much as Karate, etc. are. The focus is on deflecting an attacker's force rather than meeting it head on. (The taoist analogy would be like how water shapes (and can even destroy sometimes!) its environment, but it is not itself hard, but very pliant. I suppose if there is a rigid "PD" personality, something that teaches flexibility may help! Just curious, have there ever been any formal studies of exercise slowing down the pd? My roomate saw an article a couple years ago (before I knew I had pd), about a guy who was supposedly fighting it off by working out like a fiend every day. I've been diagnosed for 3 years +, and I'm not on Sinemet yet and still playing soccer, volleyball, running, lifting weights, and now doing the Tai Chi and maybe Kung Fu and this summer yoga. Things are slowly changing, including my endurance and reaction times, but I'm not quitting yet. I intend to keep trying new things, for a few reasons: the greater my repertoire, the better workout I'm getting, the more variety of stimulus to my brain, no atrophying muscles, a variety of methods I can fall back on and choose different ones depending on my day to day state, or as my capabilities change overall, and possibly retrain my brain to use as yet unexplored regions (kinda like Star Trek... to go where no man (or woman) has gone before). Along this vein, I'm also doing alot of PD research and theorizing, and reading other subjects too, to hopefully stave off most of the cognitive problems. One person I really admire is Steven Hawking who wrote "A Brief History of Time". He's a physics professor at Cambridge or Oxford who has ALS, and yet he is one of THE major theorists in modern physical cosmology. His mind is as sharp as it gets, even tho' his physical body may severely limit him otherwise, and he has used his mind to ponder the BIG questions about how the universe began, etc. One other general comment, I have seen a few references, both here and elsewhere, talking about the average number of "useful", "productive," or "independent" years on average a person with pd has until they become totally disabled. I personally believe that these averages are based on historical data, and alot of advances have been made, both technologically and in our perceptions of pd and disease (mind/body links), which can blow these numbers away. I know I get tired in a way of seeing predictions, while not necessarily meant to do so, that put limits on us and what expectations we're supposed to have for our future(s). The only ultimate limits there are are those which we either impose on ourselves or let others do so. I DO NOT accept these figures as gospel, and I intend to ignore them, lest they brainwash me, and set my own agenda. EVEN IF I become totally disabled, I WILL NOT become unproductive or a burden, I will simply channel my energies elsewhere. (I just watched the PBS show "People in Motion" 3-part series on people with disabilities, that my dad had taped for me, and I was overwhelmed by the creativity, ingenuity and perserverance of these people shown on the show, especially the man who essentially started the whole disability rights movement and was himself paralyzed from the waist down and on an iron lung due to childhood polio.) Alot of my drive is due to the fact that my youngest brother died of cancer when he was five (having gotten sick around 2-2.5 years old), and he fought hard and lived a full life in 5 short years, so I've got alot more than that in already, and probably alot more to go. My parents would not treat him any different than they did us (excepting of course as was absolutely necessary), and he supposedly got real mad at my dad once when he (my brother) said something to my dad about when my other brother and I had our chemo when we were little, and my dad had to tell him that we didn't ever have chemo. Boy, he got mad, and insisted we had, that all little kids got chemo. My roomate tells me that sometimes people come to her cuz they don't want to ask me, and ask what's "wrong" with me. (My brother used to get MAD at people, including grown-ups who should know better, staring at his bald head). I told her it'd be easier if I had two heads, or none at all, because then it'd be obvious. It gets frustrating having to constantly be telling people what's "wrong" or else having them think you're on drugs or something. I don't deny the pd and that something's "wrong", but it does vary day to day. Unless it's a bad day, I don't notice it. It's part of me, for better or worse, it's not necessarily "wrong" (altho' when it's bad I do not alwaays feel this chummy about the whole thing), and I don't want to be labeled "PD victim" or have to walk around with a billboard on my head announcing what's "wrong" to people I've just met. It gets old explaining over and over...actually maybe the billbooard would save me the effort, or just carry a tape player with a recorded message. I'm just rambling on because that altho' my friends empathsize, they haven't experienced this, and can't totally relate, and it's something only someone that's "been there" can relate to. I really appreciate having this list for that reason. Well, enough moaning and tying up everyone's time. Adios! Wendy T.