A Path With Paws

Did you know that if you have dystonia, typing is easier if you are listening to music with a 120 beat? Many of my exercises involving moving to music with a 120 beat as music causes us to bypass our frontal context to do movement.

This last week I traveled to Toronto to work with Dr. Joaquin Farias who specializes and in fact has dedicated this life to work in helping people with dystonias and similar movement disorders heal through neuroplasticity movement exercises. It was a life changing experience and today I am typing this completely off Parkinson’s medication.

For the first time since coming down with Parkinson’s two and a half years ago my body is still and comfortable without medication. I have tremor in my left hand still but some of that is my body trying to rewire my hand to my brain where the connection has been lost. In fact he says my tremor will get worse as I start to rewire and heal and loss my rigidity. I have gotten back a very small amount of my arm swing in my left arm since the beginning of the week and I am confident with work I can have normal arm swing again. Today I was able to throw a beanbag cow with a wrist movement where before this week I could only throw with a shoulder movement and had a hard time releasing to throw. These may not sound like much but Parkinson’s is supposed to be regenerative, getting worse, not better. And my body is not supposed to be able to heal and make dopamine again. But I never believed that and neither does Dr. Farias.

He believes I have a secondary dystonia to my Parkinson’s and a partial functional paralysis on my left side where my brain’s frontal cortex has disconnected from my body. This can be rewired with exercises similar to someone who has suffered a stroke. The dystonia can also be worked with through exercises that help stimulate the parasympathic nervous system. Luckily our brain holds an incredible neuroplasticity potential to be rewired and relearn function that has been lost. I also have a number for exercises to get my brain to make dopamine again, the neurotransmitter lost in Parkinson’s disease. If I can help my functional paralysis and dystonia, my Parkinson’s may actually be asymptomatic or very close to it!

I know this will be a long journey for me to get better including about two hours of exercises throughout the day, everyday, and small steps. I will probably still need medication some of the time.

I have so much more I want to share about my experience and will over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I highly recommend Joquin’s book Limitless.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2017 at 7:30 pm and is filed under parkinsons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.