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Hi, Barb.

Your comments about the 20/20 "Parkinson's" piece were well-stated. I too
was startled by the claim in the piece that the French team had
apparently come up with this deep-brain-stimulation-for-PD as something
ENTIRELY NEW and that it appeared, from how the piece was focused, to be a
sort permanent symptomatic CURE.

I thought that I had read info on the net, for quite some time now, that
this technique had already been developed & tested elsewhere -- including,
according to a March 14 PR Newswire press-release on the internet, by a
US-based company called Medtronics; in that press-release (which I saved),
the company claims that some 2,000 people in Europe, Canada, and Australia
have already been implanted with Medtronics' deep-brain-stimulation
system. And I also see that the release notes that an FDA panel had just
approved testing of the Medtronics device for potential FDA approval for
use in the United States.

So I wonder: how could 20/20 have possibly excluded such significant
information in its report? Wouldn't reportage on that particular device,
and on exactly how those alleged 2,000 people are faring on it, qualify as
being highly relevant to the topic?

Something just doesn't seem to add up.

- SJS