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Originally Posted by macallan25
He has said on TV that he has not taken his medicine on occasion to add an extra dimension to his speeches........such as the one that has been seen on TV many times from a year or two ago when he addressed Congress..
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I know that. However, I've already had an indepth discussion about this very subject on another forum. What you see in this commercial is typical of his Parkinsons medications. Parkinsons Disease alone will not cause dyskinetic movements.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/1...tor-after-all/
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the chorea that Michael J Fox has in that ad comes from chronic use of dopamine agonists in the context of Parkinson's. They're movements from the medicine, not the disease itself. Although he might have odd movements OFF of his meds, they wouldn't look like the ones in the ad. They'd look like the Parkinson's-like presentation of Muhammed Ali's Dementia Pugilistica.
In addition, those movements are hard to imitate accurately because they stem from circuits between the basal ganglia and cortex that you can't just turn off or on. Those aren't volitional circuits. There is little chance he was acting, and if he was, he could only accentuate slightly movementse already had. In other words, this is as tragic as it looks.
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http://www.pdf.org/AboutPD/med_treatment.cfm
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Carbidopa/Levodopa (Sinemet) Levodopa is a substance that is converted into dopamine by an enzyme in the brain. It is then released by brain cells and activates dopamine receptors allowing for normal function of the movement control centers of the brain. Forty years after its discovery, levodopa remains the most effective medication for Parkinson's disease. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of treated Parkinson's patients are on levodopa therapy. Levodopa is the gold standard by which all treatments for Parkinson's are measured.
Levodopa combined with carbidopa (or Sinemet) represented a significant improvement in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. The addition of carbidopa prevents levodopa from being converted into dopamine in the bloodstream, allowing more of it to get to the brain. Therefore, a smaller dose of levodopa is needed to treat symptoms. In addition, the nausea and vomiting often associated with levodopa treatment is greatly reduced by the presence of carbidopa. Unfortunately, with increased dosing and prolonged use of levodopa, patients experience other side-effects including dyskinesias (spontaneous, involuntary movements) and "on-off" periods when the medication will suddenly and unpredictably start or stop working.
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(Bolding by me.)
The replacements for the L-Dopa therapy can cause hallucinations, so Fox would either have to jerk spasmodically in front of congress or hallucinate. It does not surprise me that he did come off his medications in order to address them. However, that's not the issue at hand.