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Hi Janet, Many researchers make the mistake of adopting 'a priori' reasoning just as you have described, ie, 'everyone who has A also has/does not have B, therefore A is a result of having/not having B." Two of the factors that most affect the influence of PD medication on individuals are: 1. The timing of meals and the type of food eaten, in relation to the type of medication, and the time of its consumption, by the *individual* sufferer. 2. The production/lack of production of mood influencing chemicals such as adrenalin (epinephrine) and serotonin in the *individual*. Note the emphasis here. What affects one person does not necessarily affect others. The sample sizes in much previous PD research have been way too small to guarantee the reliability of hypotheses. If there are X number of possibilities in a given experiment, there needs to be *at least* X number of volunteers, *plus* X number of controls. The only money to be made from researching PD in the past has been that supplied by the drug companies, who could recover the cost on the sales of medication developed from the research. They were not particularly interested in a *cure*, because that was a once-only profit. (No, I don't think I am paranoid. Anyway, just because one *is* paranoid, doesn't mean that the b-----ds are *not* out to get you. <grin>) Hopefully the money available under the Udall Bill will, if it materialises, provide incentives for larger, more universal studies. Meanwhile our small research team intends, if the analysis of the data we have collected suggests such an approach, to next investigate the relationships between PD, stress, the production and presence/absence of stress chemicals, and altered states of mind such as those caused by hypnosis, etc. Jim - 59/13 - Sinemet - Eldepryl ------------------------------------------------- Jim Slattery - [log in to unmask] Central West PD Web http://www.bec.net.au/~cwpdg/ -------------------------------------------------