How Is It Treated
At this time, there is no cure for Parkinson’s disease. But there are several types of medicines that can control the symptoms and make the disease easier to live with.
You may not even need treatment if your symptoms are mild. Your doctor may wait to prescribe medicines until your symptoms start to get in the way of your daily life. Your doctor will adjust your medicines as your symptoms get worse. You may need to take several medicines to get the best results.
Levodopa is the best drug for controlling symptoms of Parkinson’s. But it can cause problems if you use it for a long time or at a high dose. So doctors sometimes use other medicines to treat people in the early stages of the disease.
The decision to start taking medicine, and which medicine to take, will be different for each person. Your doctor will be able to help you make these choices.
In some cases, a treatment called deep brain stimulation may also be used. For this treatment, a surgeon places wires in your brain. The wires carry tiny electrical signals to the parts of the brain that control movement. These little signals can help those parts of the brain work better.
There are many things you can do at home that can help you stay as independent and healthy as possible. Eat healthy foods. Get the rest you need. Make wise use of your energy. Get some exercise every day. Physical therapy and occupational therapy can also help.
Caring For A Spouse With Parkinson’s
Its hard for a healthy person to care for another living with Parkinsons especially when the symptoms advance. Often, there needs to be an intervention, evidently from family or placement in a care facility. After all, PD is a progressive illness and there still isnt a known cure to date.
We can stave off the onslaught of debilitating effects through exercise, nutrition, and proper treatments, but the sad news is there is no cure. The question becomes, as the disease progresses and both develop more advanced symptoms, what happens?
The one takeaway, if you dont get anything else from this, is that no one case of Parkinsons is the same. That being said, in the example of my wife and me, her symptoms are more complex and debilitating than mine, therefore, I take on the role of care partner
The Experiences Of Carers Looking After People With Parkinsons Disease Who Exhibit Impulsive And Compulsive Behaviours: An Exploratory Qualitative Study
School of Health Sciences, City, University of London, London, UK
Correspondence
Advanced Clinical Practitioner-Parkinsons Disease
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK
School of Health Sciences, City, University of London, London, UK
Correspondence
Advanced Clinical Practitioner-Parkinsons Disease
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK
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Before Parkinsons Patti Smith
It was the night before New Years Eve and we had Patti Smith. Bruce Springsteen was a surprise guest. Someone alerted the fire department that there were too many people. These beefy guys came down, all these big galoots. They wanted to stop the show, he remembers. Patti Smith was shouting do you know who I am? There will be a riot! Blood will be on your hands! Everyone was in uproar.
There was a stand-off, I tried to calm things down. They agreed to let Patti and Bruce finish a couple of songs. Patti wouldnt stop shouting about wanting to play more songs. She was a bit of a brat, she had an attitude.
Another highlight was when Mink DeVille, a band that Allen worked as a road manager and publicist for, was signed by Capitol Records. I even sing on their record, he says.
Inevitably, there were a few rock n roll adventures, including a memorable stand-off with Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen and the New York Fire Department during his stint as box office manager at the CBGB Second Avenue Theater, an offshoot of the legendary music venue CBGB.
Relationships And Family Life
Whether you have Parkinsons or care for someone with the condition, Parkinsons may affect your relationships. This can happen at any stage throughout the progression of the condition. Relationships between partners or family members, including children and grandchildren, are those most likely to be affected.
While not everyone with Parkinsons will find that their relationships are affected, the condition can affect mood, self-image and communication with others.
Differing reactions and expectations following diagnosis and throughout your Parkinsons journey can also have an impact. Some people have relationship issues when theyre adjusting to diagnosis, while others may run into problems after many years.
This section covers:
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Your Most Important Relationships: Your Spouse And Yourself
The most important relationship you will have throughout your Parkinson’s is your relationship with yourself. You will need to find ways to nourish your spirit despite much adversity. You will need to find an inner spiritual core that can sustain you while you struggle to maintain a normal life despite Parkinsons daily intrusions.
No one can tell you how to do this. No one but you knows what really recharges your batteries and imparts to you an inner calm, strength, and fierceness. Whatever that thing is, that thing that gives you strength and a zest for life, you will need to nurture it and rely on it both to fight the illness and to keep your other relationships healthy and nourishing.
The second most important relationship for you, if already part of your life, will be your significant other your spouse, partner or primary companion. This person is the one who will witness your hardest moments and your brightest. You have got to find ways to graciously accept all of the help your companion is willing to give to you. You also need to learn the ropes of coping with Parkinson’s together. As much as you can, help that person learn about Parkinson’s, keep spirits up and remain intimate with you.
Your partner needs you and you need your partner. Rejoice in that fact. Believe it or not, Parkinson’s disease and its challenges can actually deepen and strengthen your relationship.
How Drug Makes You Addicted To Sex And Betting
Dopamine is a chemical that is produced naturally in the brain and has a variety of functions.
It causes the adrenal glands, located by the kidneys, to produce the hormone adrenaline, which increases heart rate, blood pressure and stimulates the nervous system – an effect collectively known as the ‘fight or flight response’, which is the body’s response to stress or danger.
Dopamine also plays a vital role in regulating moods, sleep cycles, motor activity, behaviour and learning. It is released when we carry out certain ‘rewarding’ activities such as eating, shopping and sex – causing feelings of enjoyment and pleasure, although scientists do not know why.
This process causes addiction – a compulsion to engage in a certain activity – feeling pleasure while doing so, and if stopped from doing so experiencing ‘withdrawal’ symptoms, such as cravings, irritability, insomnia and depression.
In sufferers of Parkinson’s disease, the dopamine-producing cells of the brain die. Depleted dopamine levels cause symptoms such as motor problems, insomnia and depression. To counteract this depletion, some medications to treat Parkinson’s stimulate the production of, or mimic the effects of, dopamine in the brain.
There are about 120,000 Parkinson’s sufferers in the UK and all are on medication of this kind.
‘The change isn’t permanent – if the medication is reduced, the compulsive behaviour reverses.
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Living With A Husband Who Has Parkinsons
For the most part, living with Parkinsons is like having a third person with you at all times. Imagine having someone with you who takes control randomly and changes his mind at will. Its stressful. The major issue I have found living with Parkinsons is its unpredictability.
In terms of our lives, I am most challenged by my inability to plan. I never know how Parkinsons will impact my husband. Dennis can be doing something fairly normal, such as having dinner or watching television. Then, suddenly, he cant walk. Sometimes his is even frozen in place. He can be ready to go to a football game one minute and unable to get out of the car the next. He can enter a party with enthusiasm looking energetic and lively and find that he has to leave the festivities a half hour later hardly able to navigate out the door. Our lives have become a best guess scenario in terms of how Dennis body will perform at any given time.
This unpredictability is often misunderstood by people who dont know Parkinsons symptoms or appreciate the complexity of the disease. I understand their confusion and sometimes disbelief. It is difficult to accept that a person with Parkinsons who looks healthy enough one when he entered the room lacks the control to buck-up, push through or hold on a minute.
Expect Stages Of Grief
Of course, those who love and those who have invested in you may react initially with grief, anger, and disappointment. Those stages, however, should not continue indefinitely. Your loved ones need to learn that you are still you and that the relationship can still go on.
Over time, as your Parkinson’s disease progresses, your contribution to the relationship will change or may even diminish, but that is entirely understandable. Even relationships among healthy people undergo dramatic changes over the course of the years. Why should a relationship with someone who has Parkinson’s be any different?
In short, people around you need to come to terms with your disease and its implications for the relationship. Once they do so, the relationship will grow and may even nourish both of you just as it always had done.
The work your friends and family must do after you receive the diagnosis is clear: They must come to terms with your condition and learn that you are still the same old you. Those close to you must further decide how involved they can be in your care when you need help.
The work you must do on all of your relationships is different. You must learn how to maintain your relationships despite being relentlessly pursued by your disease. Each relationship will require a different set of responses from you in order to maintain it and to keep it healthy.
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Your Home And Lifestyle
- Modify your activities and your home. For example, simplify your daily activities, and change the location of furniture so that you can hold on to something as you move around the house.
- Eat healthy foods, including plenty of fruits, vegetables, grains, cereals, legumes, poultry, fish, lean meats, and low-fat dairy products.
- Exercise and do physiotherapy. They have benefits in both early and advanced stages of the disease.
Surviving Marriage While Surviving Parkinsons Disease
She was nine years younger than his 37 years of age. Two months into their relationship, a Parkinsons disease diagnosis was inevitable.
She had a decision to make. A choice that would affect the rest of her life. Should she continue seeing him? Invest her life in something that could very well be the hardest thing shed ever have to face? Or should she step away and protect herself from certain future heartache?
She did her research on Parkinsons disease. She read up on what it might be like to marry a person with it. She read up on the symptoms and the treatments available. She researched studies that may come to fruition to aid in her husbands care.
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What Does This Paper Contribute To The Wider Global Clinical Community
- This study reveals the impact of ICBs on patientcarer relationships and the ways that disclosure and access to support may be limited by the nature of these condition features.
- Commonly used drug treatments can induce or worsen ICBs, and health professionals need to be aware of the risks of these medication side effects.
- Health professionals have a key role in advising, supporting and monitoring for ICBs and need to be appropriately informed and alert to risks and onset at the initial stages of assessment and treatment in order to limit potential harms.
How Parkinsons Changes A Marriage
One of the reasons I married Allen is because he has always been very protective of me, and he told me he will always take care of me. Unfortunately, he can no longer care for me in the same ways he used to. He takes medication to help him sleep, so he is unable to jump up out of bed and walk around, so if we hear a noise in the middle of the night, I have to check it out.
I know hed like to still take care of me, and he tells me this all the time. It just isnt possible the way it used to be.
One of the reasons I married Allen is because he told me he will always take care of me it just isnt possible the way it used to be.
Parkinsons affects the entire body every system. There are lots of new eating noises, shuffling, falls, hes slower to process information, he has poorer sense of direction, differences in eyesight, she says. All of these things impact our relationship. It just isnt the same.
Patience is very difficult to come by when interacting with Allen. He is often telling me to stop yelling at him. But yelling is what I do first : when he falls, for instance.
Allen is so perceptive that I think he understands without my having to voice it. He still takes wonderful care of my psyche, which is more basic anyway.
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Utilize Your Strengths As A Care Partner
I rely on my strengths: dishes, laundry, shared cooking, etc. and vice versa. She utilizes her strengths: dealing with bill collectors, med refills, talking on the telephone, etc. We each bring different skill sets to our relationship and sometimes they overlap.
However crazy they may seem and uncoordinated they appear, it works for us. I encourage everyone living with PD or caring for someone with PD to communicate their needs, yes, but also things that you are able to do yourself.
Can people living with Parkinsons get married? Working together as a team works for us and it can work for you. Cupid was right on target.
Happy Anniversary to my life partner and soulmate!
What Causes Parkinson’s Disease
No one knows for sure what makes these nerve cells break down. But scientists are doing a lot of research to look for the answer. They are studying many possible causes, including aging and poisons in the environment.
Abnormal genes seem to lead to Parkinson’s disease in some people. But so far, there is not enough proof to show that it is always inherited.
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Being In A Relationship
We’ve met many couples and families who say that coping with Parkinson’s together has made their relationships stronger.
But some people find that Parkinson’s does affect their relationships, and this can happen at any stage of the condition.
Parkinsons may affect your self-image, mood and how you communicate with others. This may happen if youre in a casual or committed relationship, or if youre single. Some people have relationship issues in the early days, when theyre adjusting to diagnosis, while others may run into problems after many years of living with Parkinsons.
Each person with Parkinsons has their own experience of the condition. The symptoms you have may be different from other people. Its important to remember that many people go through sexual and relationship issues at some stage in their life, so any problems you have may have nothing to do with Parkinsons at all.
Rejecting The Christian Idea Of Marriage
In the modern era, this Christian understanding of marriage, this notion of a union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others as Sir James Wilde defined it, has been comprehensively and completely rejected. These changes are well-known, but it is at least worth reviewing what they mean for modern marriages and more broadly, modern family relationships. There has been a huge controversy in recent years about same-sex marriage but it is important to see that the changes brought about in the nature of marriage long preceded that debate. We had pretty much abandoned the Christian view of marriage as underpinning our national laws, at least a decade earlier.
For life, to the exclusion of all others
In 1975 in Australia, but a little earlier in other Western countries, we abandoned the idea that marriage was a covenant, a union of men and women for life to the exclusion of all others that would be protected in law. Divorce, until 1975, was a remedy for a wrong. The husband who broke the marriage covenant by adultery, or who deserted his wife, or who treated her cruelly, could be divorced by her and would need to pay spousal maintenance, or alimony, for her as a form of damages for breach of that covenant.
So no-fault divorce, introduced in 1975, ended the notion of marriage being presumptively for life. It was replaced with a policy that marriage lasted only as long as both parties wanted it to.
A legal union
of a man and a woman
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Parkinson’s And Your Spouse Or Partner
Schedule regular open, honest and frank discussions with your significant other. Give your partner room to voice frustrations not only with Parkinson’s disease but with you. Talk about money issues on some sort of regular basis as well, as issues like this can very easily create background anxiety in even the best of times.
The two of you should consider some sort of couples therapy or regular meetings with some trusted, impartial observer who can provide a forum for sharing frustrations and ideas on how to overcome those frustrations. You need to be able to talk about the inevitable role changes that occur when Parkinson’s enters the picture.
When you were healthy, perhaps you both worked and made near-equal amounts of money, but now perhaps your contribution to the familys finances is not as great as it once was. If this is the case, your spouse might need to work more at a time when he or she also needs to put in more time to care for you and your needs. How do you feel about this? How does your partner feel? Talk it out and, if need be, talk it out with a counselor.
It is amazing how effective talking can be. Just sharing feelings and fears can resolve a million problems. If your spouse is stressed at all the new obligations she faces in caring for you, you, in turn, feel depressed by your helplessness. Sharing your feelings with one another will defuse any resentment that tends to build in reaction to the pain and stress you both inevitably feel.