The Velvet Touch

It starts with decreasing sexual potency. Then after a while you notice that handwriting is becoming difficult, and that your formerly neat and highly legible hand is growing small, cramped, and barely decipherable. It gets harder and harder to get out of the car, and you notice you're walking much more slowly than you used to. You experience frequent bouts of moodiness and depression. Then the shaking starts, and the doctor tells you you've got Parkinson's Disease.

Though incurable, it's not fatal, and is treatable. Sufferers are always looking for effective treatments, of course, and there are plenty of possibilities available, most of them brought to us through the good graces of certified members of the American Medical Association. Some of these are more effective than others, and all are very expensive.

There are a few non-AMA-supplied remedies. One is physical therapy, and certain yoga postures have been shown to have some usefulness in moderating the effects of the disease, along with certain balancing exercises.

It was with relief in mind that I went to Wikipedia's entry on Parkinson's Disease to see what all is out there that might offer some relief from all of the above, and there, at the very bottom of what proved to be a very long page, beneath the extensive catalogue of frankendope pharmaceuticals with nightmarish side effects, under the heading "Complementary Therapies," was a brief reference to mucuna pruriens.

This is a fairly common tropical legume, commonly known as the velvet bean. Since it's a plant, Pfizer can't take out a patent on it. Extract of the black, shiny bean, which like the acorn is edible but highly toxic if not boiled several times, is sold in health supplement stores in this country as L-Dopa, referring to the plant's capacity for stimulating dopamine production. It's lack of dopamine that causes Parkinson's.

Practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine in India have been treating Parkinson's Disease with it for over 4,000 years.

Shhh! Don't let the AMA know that we found out about this. They might send the EM wagon.

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