Innovative and Breakthrough in Parkinson Treatment

Global War on Parkinson

Globally there are over 50 million people suffering from this disease. Every year over 100,000 deaths are attributable to this disease. Until today, there is no known treatment to halt or reverse the progression of the disease, much less a cure. However, thousands of medical workers and scientists are devoting their time and effort to a global war on Parkinson's.

Why Treatment Is Hard to Find

The immediate cause of Parkinson's is the deficiency in the naturally produced dopamine within one's body. the anti-Parkinson medications L-DOPA and dopamine agents, improve the early symptoms of the disease in the early stages. As the disease progresses, the effectiveness of this line of drugs fade, but the symptoms, because the normal body functions had been wearing out, remains and actually becomes a separate disorder in themselves. If we look at a patient at an advanced stage of Parkinson's we are looking at a family of disorders, each calling out for attention and treatment itself. In this stage, even if we were able to restore our natural dopamine levels, the symptoms if left untreated, would persist and continue to worsen. These untreated symptoms, give rise to the Parkinson's reputation as incurable, and degenerative. In order to conquer Parkinson's, we need to wage simultaneous attacks on each and every symptoms simultaneously.

The Natural Healing Power of Our Bodies

There is a commonly held belief among both Eastern and Western medical professionals that the human body contains natural healing power. When a disease or disorder shows up, that means some external factors have tipped the balance between a disorder-causing agent and the human body's self-healing power, and often all that is needed is a little help for order to be restored. As medical science progresses, Western medicine takes the path to understand disease at a molecular level and seeks to treat disease by intervention. Eastern medicine has taken to understand how to control and harness the natural healing power in the human body. Take for instance a patient who has shattered his ankle in a car accident. There are 2 immediate goals for the first aid provider:

1. Ease the pain of the patient.
2. Heal the broken ankle to function normally again.

A Western doctor would give the patient a pain-killing drug in order to block the pain signals from reaching the brain. A surgeon would hold the broken ankle bone fragments together with nuts and bolts and then bind the wound so that it may heal.

An Eastern doctor would use acupuncture to signal the brain to produce the natural pain killer – endocrine which morphine-like characteristic to ease the pain. The bone fragments are secured with a frame and covered with herbs to facilitate healing.

We can see that while the objectives are identical the aproaches are different.

Historic Framework

The origin of the Chinese medicine (Acupuncture) can be traced back to 1766 BC. Obviously in those days, little was understood about human physiology. The framework that Chinese medicine was based on was that of meridian lines that runs along the vertebrate of the human body. Even though this framework has served the development and evolution of Chinese medicine quite effectively for thousands of years, it became controversial when human physiology became better understood in the past 100 years. Western medicine practitioners found it hard to accept the existence of something invisible in the human body. The purpose of the current discussion is not to debate the existents of meridian lines, but to offer another view of acupuncture more consistent with modern physiology.

A Rough Model of Human Physiology

At a very high level we can see the human body to be connected by a network of blood vessels and nerves. Blood vessels consist of arteries, which are responsible for delivery of oxygen and nutrients to all the organs in the body. The veins carry away wastes, and toxins to be filtered by the kidneys and liver. The network of nerves carry signals to and from the brain to different parts of the body. We can draw the analogy that the human body is like a city, with the arteries compared to fresh water pipes and veins compared to the sewage line that carries waste to the waste treatment plants. We can draw the analogy of the liver and the kidney as the sewage treatment plant and the heart as the fuel plant that supplies energy (oxygenated blood) throughout the body. There is a network of nerves that carries signals from the brain to organs and muscle to perform functions such as walking and heart-beat. Similarly, nerves carry signals from the limbs, organs and muscles to the brain.

Modern Theory of Acupuncture

For the normal, healthy operation of the body all these blood-flows and signal-flows must operate in harmony. A disorder or a disease upsets the harmony and there is where acupuncture comes in. Acupuncture sends signals to the affected organ or muscle, and orders that the balance be restored to restore the harmony.

Accupoints are defined as a set of precisely located pin-points that cover our entire boy from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet. There are about 400 accupoints well documented and commonly used by all practitioners, but some experienced masters report as many as 3,000 points. Each accupoint is associated with the functioning of an organ. The relationship of accupoints to organs is not one-to-one, but many-to-many. Thus, to get the desired effect on an organ, inserting a needle in one accupoint is insufficient. It is common to select a set of points to operate at the same time in order to achieve the desired effect.

The term acupuncture broadly covers all disease and disorder treatment techniques utilizing needles on the body. In reality there are many different schools of acupuncture treatments. For Parkinson's, the best school of treatment is using acupuncture to trigger the self-healing of the targeted organ, or the waking of sleeping antibodies. Natural healing has many benefits. There is no need to introduce externally applied drugs to force the cell behavior one way or the other. There are no side effects and the treatment cannot be overdone. This is particularly effective for disorders caused internally.

Parkinson Case Study

Dr. C is a 72 year-old who has been suffering from Parkinson's for 6 years. Dr. C is a US educated Ph.D. in Computer Science and have been employed in the past 40+ years as a software engineer. Here is his story in the first person:

"Six years ago I was diagnosed by a neurologist with Parkinson's. I was further informed that this was a degenerative disorder with no known cure. The only consolation was that at my age the progress of the disease would be slow and I would probably live thru my natural life before the dreadful terminal stage of the Parkinson's disease."

"My Parkinson's symptoms are walking instability, speech stuttering and drooling. Walking is unstable because I am not able to keep my back straight, as a result my head is hanging down and my center of gravity is in front of my body. To maintain balance I have to walk in small shuffling steps at increasing speed, thus making my walking even more unstable. I fall down on the average once a week. When I get into an unstable position my body would tell my mind in an intense anxiety attack that ‘I am going to fall!!!' and then the fall becomes inevitable. Habitually my left knee breaks the fall and therefore my left knee is always bruised and in pain. My legs were so weak that I had a hard time getting up from a sitting position. My back and neck muscle are always so tense that I have trouble turning my head."

My neurologist prescribed the anti-Parkinson's drug Levodopa which has the side-effects of causing drowsiness and constipation. Later, I went to seek help from a Parkinson's specialists at the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, California. The specialist prescribed the same drug at a higher dosage. The drug seems to help somewhat with speech and drooling but has had hardly any effect on my unstable walking.

Recently I came to get help from the American Parkinson's Association for Chinese Traditional Medicine. The diagnosis of my walking is that my organs have been weakened by years of ravage by Parkinson's. This symptom is now a disorder in itself and no amount of dopamine replenishing is going to help. I went thru a series of acupuncture sessions to strengthen the organs and thus restore my back to a straight condition. My legs regained strength and my tense muscles are relaxed thru massage.

Dawn of An Era - First Reported Case of a Successful Parkinson Treatment

One day in 2007, an elderly gentleman walked into my clinic in the Ginza district of Tokyo Japan. He was the CEO and owner of a major shipping business in Japan. He told his 75 year-old business partner had been suffering from Parkinson for 5-6 yrs. and was now in a Tokyo hospital. All possible Western-medicine treatments had been tried without success. He was now just waiting for the end to come. My acupuncture clinic was the last glimmer of hope the CEO had for his business partner. THE CEO had two questions for me:

"Can you treat my partner?"

My answer was a definitive "yes" despite the fact that no physician, Eastern or Western, had ever accomplished that on record.

"How long would it take?"

"3 to 6 months" was my estimate.

In Western medicine the practice is to find the root cause of the disease, in this case the loss of dopamine produced in the frontal lobe of the brain, and then to subsequently discover or create drugs to counter the cause. It sometimes takes decades to find the root cause and then much longer to find an effective drug without side effects that are worse than the disease itself.

In Eastern medicine Parkinson is looked upon as a set of symptoms that must be addressed simultaneously. When all symptoms are reversed and stopped, the disease is treated, regardless of the root cause of the disease.

The patient showed up the next day. His symptoms included clinched limb and body muscles, slurred speech due to a stiff tongue muscle, and the signature Parkinsonian symptom - hand tremor. He shuffled into clinic taking small steps.

Acupuncture attacks the symptoms by activating the natural self-healing mechanisms built into all of the cells of our bodies. Thus without specifying dopamine in particular, the cells in the frontal lobe of the brain are instructed to start healing through the stimulation of the Accupuncture. This translates to a recovery from whatever disorder reduced the normal amount of dopamine production to begin with. That also means a reduction in the signal from the brain to tell the body muscles to clinch.

The arching back was due partly to the clinched abdomen muscle and partly due to the weakened back muscles. It was necessary to relax the abdominal muscle, strengthen the back muscles, as well as strengthen the organs that support the back muscles. Because we rely on nothing more than the natural self healing built into our body’s cells, we do not need any drugs, manufactured or herbal.

This patient was also extremely needle-phobic. He absolutely refused to have the Accupuncture needles inserted into his body. I ended up replacing the needles with nothing more than my trained, toughened fingers. This is also a success story for needle-less acupuncture.

I took the patient through an intensive treatment regimen of 3 hours a day. After 2 months, the patient walked out of my clinic a happy man. This was the first recorded successful treatment of Parkinsons.