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At 12:57 9-8-98 -0400, Tom Riess wrote: >Someone mentioned backwards walking when forwards results in a freeze and I >couldn't resist offering this as a possible explanation. > >Normal forward walking requires displacing one's body weight past the fall >point and then the advancing extremity "catches" the body before it falls. >If for whatever reason there is a perceived or real inability to advance >the leg, then fear of falling is a very strong inhibitory force against >normal walking (i.e. projecting forward). <fontfamily><param>Times New Roman</param><bigger><bigger>Tom, After reading your mail, I tried to fit my troubles with walking in your theory. That weird phenomenon of not being able to walk normal, but at the same time being able to walk backwards without a problem was, nearly 14 years ago, for me the sign that I was seriously ill; a fact that I had managed to deny till then. But now, looking back to the symptoms I had before, they are much less weird. My disabilities started with only being able to walk from my home to the railway station and from another railway stattion to my workplace, by using a few tricks. First my left leg did seem to increase in weight every step I made. I could overcome this temporarely by changing my shoulder bag to my other shoulder. I could walk normally a small amount of steps again or by taking a short pause and than starting again or to run!!!. Because my symptoms were so heavy, the neuro wanted, before I started to take sinemet exclude other diseases; so I was hospitalised. The hospital staff was not asthonished, seeing me walking backward in the corridor. They had seen that before and there was some joking about me using a driving mirror. But (and this seems to me contradictory to your theorie, Tom) when wallking friends, who visited, me to the door, all troubles with walking were gone as soon as I started to walk downstairs. I could do this quickly and relaxed. The neuro explained me that PWP's lose first their capacity to run certain inborn programs. The turning to ones other side in bed is normally ruled by such an inborn program Normal walking has of course to be learned, but the program is in our brain inborn and the only thing we have to learn is to use this program, so he said. So, the way to overcome some incapacities is making the task more complex. While I was writing this I got your last mail, Tom , in which you say about the same thing. But I don't understand how this relates to your theory of the role of anxiety. I have experienced the role of anxiety resulting in freezing in another way. I had been capable to walk downstairs for years as a PWP. But later, when my equilibrium was deteriorating, I started to fall occasionaly. I had also some near falls ( or so I experienced it) from the top of stairs and I realised I had to be carefull walking downstairs. That made me freeze sometimes and lose control, not only on top of stairs, but after a real fall had happened, I had the same freezing response on top of escalators, which I, till now, only dare to use goig down (going upsatairs is no problem) when in company of someone who protects me against falling. About the same thing happened in the mountains. The first years after I was diagnosed, I could miraculously walk on the steep footpaths, but the same deteroration of my equilibrium made me insecure and after a near fall, in which I could manage to redirect myself to the rocks and not down into a deep precipice, I froze when walking on paths, from which a fall would be the end and so it was becoming really dangerous This seems the same mechanism that you suppose to be active in the disability to walk normally in the sense that we can't walk because the execution of the act causes fear and that causes freezing. The way I experience it, (but by that it is of course not proven to be true), is that not being able to walk without leva-dopa is a coordination disturbance, just as not being able to peel a potato. Regards, Ida Kamphuis</bigger></bigger></fontfamily> -------------------------------------------------------------- Vriendelijke Groeten / Kind regards, Ida Kamphuis mailto: [log in to unmask]