Hello Wesley, your experiences do indeed seem to be typical of the condition
which I described, and remind me of my condition when I started to get to the
tricky time of 6 or 7 years with PD. I was taking a mixture of tablets, and
found it impossible to make sense of my reactions to the tablets. This is
why I wrote my program - to help me with the analysis, with such success (in
my case) that I decided to try it out on a few volunteers to see if I could
possibly help them. Since I joined the list, about 2 years ago, I have tried
to help about 20 people, with varying degrees of success. About 15 of those
I would say felt that they had gained some benefit from the exercise. To
avoid repeating myself too many times, anyone who is interested in finding
out more about my program, and who can 'surf the web' will find a detailed
exposition of my program (And a lot of interesting articles from other
people as well) on Simon Coles' excellent web site:
<http://james.parkinsons.org.uk>
Everyone can understand a simple observation that: If you can identify a
dosage regime which clearly produces an overdose condition, then somewhere
between that regime and no tablets at all, there should be an ideal regime
which produces just the required response : you feel 'normal'. To get
technical for a moment, the assumption in my statement is that there is
a clearly defined 'ideal flow' condition to which one can iterate, based
on observation of the subject's response. In reality there may be a number
of 'false trails' on the way to the ideal trail, but my philosophy is to
first, see if the simple assumption works, and then if that fails think
again. I think the reasons why more people do no find my 'Ideal path' by
taking tablets as prescribed by their doctor are two-fold: One is the very
real difficulty of understanding what is happening to someone with PD if
they don't have the condition, and the other is the (to my mind) naive
belief that a dosage rate to hit the 'ideal' dosage can be achieved by
somehow juggling whole numbers of tablets. You will get nowhere by a logic
which says for instance ' If one tablet is not enough, try two' or ' If one
tablet every 4 hours is not enough, try one every 3 hours.' People simply do
not come calibrated in whole numbers of tablets. The rule which works for
me, for instance, is: Take 1.5 Madopar 62.5, every 2 hours. In my present
condition (19 yrs since diagnosis, 1.75 tablets would give me diskynesias
and 1.25 tablets would fail to switch me On. But if I get it right-Bingo:
I can walk, drive, and still function pretty well. Just to complete the
story, I have of course gone further downhill since I did that analysis,
and I have compensated for that by taking Pergolide (Permax), slowy
increasing the dosage as my personal contribution declined, so that I now
take the same madopar, plus 3.5 milli gm of Permax. The fact that I have
been able to take 3,5 mg of Permax with no noticeable loss of operating
margin shows that Permax works.
Sorry, long winded as usual
Regards
--
B J Collins <[log in to unmask]>
