Category Archives: The Big Picture

A combination of broad overview and miscellany. Things that don’t fit elsewhere but which are too important to ignore.

And What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

<Subsonics are inaudible, extremely low frequency, yet very powerful sound waves. In nature they almost always are linked to danger and thus trigger the fight or flight response. They are also quite rare. However, in the world of the Industrial Revolution they became steadily more common. Today, millions of us live with them. Only a [...]

About PD

Tutorials and General Instruction – Arranged from Beginner to Advanced, more or less. The Human Brain From the Franklin Institute, this has to be one of the best on our subject and is particularly directed at the beginning student. It is also one of the best designed sites on the web. BBC The Human Body [...]

Cascade – Emotions and Endocrine Factors

(The following post references the chart called “The Parkinson’s Cascade” which can be viewed here.) This is one of a series of attempts to explain my view of Parkinson’s Disease in hopes of stimulating research into new areas. I freely admit to errors in this work and hope that those will be brought to my [...]

YOPD – Evidence for Early Life Origins (Part 2)

In Part One we have presented evidence from peer reviewed work by multiple researchers that supports a model of YOPD which begins in the first stages of life itself and involving not only the nervous system, but also the immune and endocrine systems. In fact, the nervous system is almost in a secondary role in [...]

YOPD – Evidence for Early Life Origins (Part 1)

“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” (The following understanding of PD arose from a three-year collaboration between myself and  French surgeon and PWP Anne Frobert of Lyon, France, and to whom half the credit must flow.) There is a branch of science called Chaos Theory which studies the order which exists in [...]

PD and Alzheimer’s: A Critical Difference

Today’s Science Daily has an article entitled: Scientists Remove Amyloid Plaques From Brains Of Live Animals With Alzheimer’s Disease Das et al at the Mayo Clinic in Florida have found that in a mouse, the stimulation of microglia leads them to destroy the plaques formed by Alzheimer’s Disease. This is in contract to PD where [...]

Rhythm and Balance

A friend, Joop Oele, at Understanding Parkinson’s Disease, has raised some interesting points about signals within the nervous system and how they translate into movement. As such things will, it has set my thinking in the direction of a number of things grouped loosely under the umbrella of this blog’s title, A Matter of Balance. [...]

PD as a Sum of Processes

Parkinson’s Disease is characterized by a number of ongoing processes: Neuroinflammation and Inflammation, Mitochondrial Failure, Oxidation, Microglial Activation, Altered Stress Response, Endothelial Failure,  Autoimmunity, Misfolding Proteins, Excitotoxicity,   – all play a role to one extent or another in the course of Parkinson’s Disease. There are almost certainly others. We really can’t understand PD without understanding, at [...]