Medicated patients read this
The Parkinson’s Recovery Project’s does not recommend attempting recovery for those people who have ever used dopamine-enhancing antiparkinson’s drugs for more than three weeks. Even if a person has stopped taking the medications, he might not be a good candidate for attempting recovery. The fullest explanation for this statement, complete with case study examples, can be found in the book Medications of Parkinson’s: Once Upon a Pill, available for free download. This book is not available in hard copy. A condensed explanation of the problem is found in the book Recovery from Parkinson’s, chapter 6. This posting gives an abbreviated version of the warning material in the above books.
Parkinsonism from dopamine-enhancing drugs
Our research began in 1998. By the fall of 2004, we were beginning to recognize an unanticipated problem: drug-induced parkinsonism in people who had ever taken any antiparkinson’s medications, even in small amounts – even if they were no longer taking those medications.
Those people with Parkinson’s who had ever taken any antiparkinson’s medication for longer than three weeks ultimately did not follow the same recovery path as people who had never taken dopamine-enhancing drugs – even if they stopped taking the drugs prior to entering the program. These people have not, in our experience, been able to permanently recover from their symptoms of drug-induced parkinsonism.
This book does not address the problems of people who have taken dopamine-enhancing anti-parkinson’s drugs for more than a few weeks. These people might have started out with idiopathic, pause-based Parkinson’s disease, but within a few weeks of using the dopamine-enhancing drugs, they might already have incurred enough brain damage from the drugs to create drug-induced parkinsonism. This means they now have two problems: whatever caused the pause-type symptoms of idiopathic Parkinson’s plus the brain damage that causes drug-induced parkinsonism.
Even if they recover from idiopathic Parkinson’s, they might still want to take the antiparkinson’s medications because they might now have drug-created damage in some of the brain’s several dopamine-producing and regulating systems. A person who actually has classic, “idiopathic” Parkinson’s disease is much less susceptible to the cumulative, adverse effects of dopamine-enhancing medication. At manufacturer-suggested low dosage levels (rarely prescribed), the adverse effects will accumulate slowly, maybe over five to ten years.
But a person who does not have or no longer has Parkinson’s disease and is taking antiparkinson’s medications in order to help with symptoms of drug-induced parkinsonism might much more rapidly develop the nightmarish adverse effects of the medication, within a few years, or a few months, or, in some cases, within a few weeks. For example, all the members of the group of illegal-drug users who developed drug-induced parkinsonism who were the basis of the dead-dopamine cell theory, died in a short period of time after taking the high doses of L-dopa that afforded them some degree of motor function. People with idiopathic PD can tolerate L-dopa for years.
I have seen rapid, horrible, mental destruction and psychosis in people who continued their previously safe levels of dopamine-enhancing antiparkinson’s medication after they recovered from Parkinson’s disease. A person who has even just started to recover from Parkinson’s but who still has symptoms of drug-induced parkinsonism might feel he needs to use the medication because of his brain damage-induced movement problems. He might even be pressured to use the now more powerful drugs against his will by his doctors or loved ones – I’ve seen a lot of this.
In a way, having Parkinson’s disease acts as a brake on the adverse effects of the drugs. So if a person does have drug-induced parkinsonism because of taking antiparkinson’s medications, in addition to having idiopathic PD, he might be better off not trying to recover and just keeping his doses as low as possible while staying the course. Since 2003, the (now retired) Parkinson’s Treatment Team and I have not worked with a person who has ever taken any dopamine-enhancing antiparkinson’s drug for more than three weeks. The reasons are explained in great detail in book Medications of Parkinson’s or Once Upon a Pill: Patient Experiences with dopamine-enhancing drugs and supplements, available on this website.