exercised
Still thinking about Dave Iverson’s Frontline program…. As a Parkinson’s patient, I tread a fine line between hope and realism. Though the program was informative and conscioiusness-raising, I think it went too far on the side of hope in the way it presented the relationship between Parkinson’s and exercise.
This morning on some networking sites, I found a proliferation of comments stating that exercise prevents Parkinson’s. That is simply untrue, as evidenced by the experiences of countless individuals who, despite rigorous, regular exercise, developed Parkinson’s.
It is troubling that people came away from the program thinking that regular workouts will render them invulnerable to the complex, multiple factors that contribute to Parkinson’s. Even more disturbing is the logical outgrowth of this line of thinking: the conclusion that Parkinson’s sufferers are to blame for their condition because they didn’t exercise enough. We can—I do—hope for a magic bullet. I wish exercise were it.
