Alternative Therapies include herbal and nutritional supplements, exercise and massage techniques. A strong evidence for their benefit is lacking in general. Patients with Parkinson Disease (PD) routinely come across them and as many as 40% end up trying one of them. Here we will very briefly summarize the available scientific support for them, if any. Acupuncture, is an ancient Chinese technique based on idea of stimulating energy centers in body through needles. Although several small clinical trials reported modest benefit, …
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Another interesting Journal Club with discussion on some excellent articles. Below is a brief summary of the articles with a short commentary of the discussion. Long term Safety and tolerability of Prosavin, a lentiviral vector-based gene therapy of Parkinson Disease Lancet. 2014 Jan 9. pii: S0140-6736(13)61939-X. Background: Parkinson Disease is treated by using levodopa that is taken up by the brain cells and converted into Dopamine thus correcting the deficiency. It is thought that rise and fall of blood levels …
Hello and Welcome to MD podcast. I am Danish Bhatti. This week podcast will be an interview with Movement Disorder experts on their approach to ataxic patient for diagnosis and management. I will be sharing my insights and approaches and we will review various other approaches. Diagnosing a patients etiology of ataxia is a tough job. And we will be picking some of the best brains to do it. The guests have not prepared and I have caught them by …
Danish Bhatti: Hello and welcome to the MD podcast. I’m Danish Bhatti. This week’s podcast will focus on Tremor disorders and to talk about it today on our show we have Dr. Diego Torres-Russotto, the director of Movement Disorders Program and movement disorder fellowship at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). We’ll talk to him about his inspiration and interest in tremors, how he got interested in orthostatic tremors a very obscure and rare disorder. We’ll also get to …
Hello and Welcome to the Movement Disorders Podcast. In this series we will be exploring the finer side of things with some of the great minds of Movement Disorders. We will get to hear interesting information on history to understand how we got to be here. We will explore the approach to diagnosis and management, the things that your books would not tell you and most importantly gets tips and tricks that will get you a step ahead in the …
The biggest efforts in Parkinson’s disease have been to figure out ways to slow down this condition and then down the road consider ways that will stop or even potentially reverse the progression of Parkinson’s disease. These efforts have been underway for more than 20 years starting as early as 1980s with attempt with vitamin E in high doses (DATATOP Study) along with selegiline a newly discovered agent at that point. Those efforts failed and vitamin E was found to …
I would divide this into three sections. What would you do before seeing your patients for the injections. What would you do on the injection day and what would you do after the injection day. So let’s look at the first segment. The first thing you should do is develop templates and notes. The documentation is highly important in doing a good injection and also for following up on your response injection and improving your injection results. So you should …
In this article, we will continue where we left off in the last newsletter in terms of research and neuroprotection in Parkinson’s Disease. This article may be read separately but is a continuation of the theme of neuroprotection research in Parkinson’s Disease. Gout, the unwalkable disease, was first identified by Egyptians nearly 2,600 years BC, but the most famous reference is to the description by Hippocrates in the Fifth Century B.C. whose aphorism for Gout still hold true. Over the …
Imagine you are on a road trip through the mountains with your family, (mom, spouse, kids). Imagine that you are driving through this serene national park with lakes and in middle of nature. Now imagine that your car breaks and you have no signals on your phone in the middle of nowhere. Hard to imagine, shouldn’t be. It actually happened to me on a trip in Colorado last summer. Your head gets dizzy with the endless barrage of questions. 1. …
Teaching methods and principles “If you do not change directions, you may end up where you are heading”. _Lao Tzu Teachers need real feedback. Most teachers love to teach but how do we tell them where are they doing a good job where they can improve. when the learning has occurred. 74% faculty are not comfortable in using technology at campus. This number has not changed in last 15 years. If we teach today’s students as if we …
