Can Anybody Tell Me Why Michael J. Fox Isn't Dead?

[Vin DSL]

Just wondering -- or maybe wandering -- just curious...

I smell a rat!

[Ron]

Because Parkinson's Disease takes many different courses.

My mother had it for 16 years before she died with it from ovarian cancer. Her PD progressed very slowly, The first 10 years were very good, the next 3 or 4 were poor, the last two were fairly debilitating, and she never had the dyskinesia like MJF does. However in retrospect, it was probably the completely missed and mis-diagnosed (lactose intolerance and celiac disease!?! What an idiot.) ovarian cancer that sapped her strength and made the PD more difficult to overcome.

Maybe his brain injected with stem cells had an effect; perhaps his PD was not congenital but was caused by some external factor, like drugs.

Who knows.

Which rat are you smelling today?

[Vin DSL]

Which rat are you smelling today?

What's wrong with this picture?
11170.jpg

[Vin DSL]

Smith: But you could have decided to do that as well when...when your symptoms were getting worse you could have said this is still nobody's business and you could have retired from acting and you could have...

Fox: Well yeah...

Smith: ...you could have dealt with this privately.

Fox: ...but retire from acting, what would you say? You'd say where'd he go? Um you can't...if you...once you live a public life, um, you know, you're going to be observed. So at a certain point you have to uh...you have to account for certain things whether you want to or not because if you don't account for it people are going to make...make up their own stories. Um which also...I don't mind too much except in that if that affects people that depend on me for their employment, people that my children depend on ...on a certain amount of stability. So you have to kind of get...get the point where you realize okay now it's crossing the threshold between something I can kind of manage and something where it's going to be taken out of my hands and um and that for somebody to make that transition and to I noticed that...it was really the first time I woke up to it that....that there was a role to play with it. That there was...I mean a useful function to it...that it wasn't just a sideshow that there might be something good that can come out of it and I started to look at it that way in really a kind of non-emotional way. But just see that there was need in this community. There's been...there's been a lack of attention and focus on this because, mostly because a large part of it...the community is older and disenfranchised to a certain extent, they don't have a voice, they don't have a lot of political clout.

Smith: Hmmm. Hmmm.

[Spathiphyllum]

Still no idea. Granted, I care not one whit about celebrity, so it would be easy for me to miss the varmint.

[Spathiphyllum]

Who is Smith in that conversation?

[Vin DSL]

When it came time for Michael to deliver his message, the toughest opponent in the room was himself. With the medication wearing off he had trouble, of all things, reading his lines. But what he did spoke volumes.

Pauley: “You had to cut your speech short.”

Fox: “Yeah, which is another thing about the gift of Parkinson’s...”

[Vin DSL]

Who is Smith in that conversation?

Yes, sorry...

http://www.canada.com/national/globa...f-c21a88f5445b

[Spathiphyllum]

Thx for link.

RE: "the gift of Parkinson's"

Had to be tongue in cheek. I can't imagine, even in a compromised position, that one in those moments of full coherence would really consider it a "gift". Or maybe he was trying to lessen the emotional scarring of others also afflicted. He's generally known as being a nice guy, so it wouldn't be unexpected that he spins his condition to the benefit of others.

Like I said, though, I don't follow their private lives if I can help it.

[Connie]

I'm not sure what a picture has to do with anything. Are you wanting to see a video that shows him shaking?

I had a great uncle with Parkinson's many years ago. He lived a long time. Finally he died.

Eventually MF will die. He could die from natural causes or because of his disease.

I do not think there is a time limit on when someone dies who has Parkinson's.

Sorry Vin but I do not understand the purpose of this thread.

[Ron]

I don't want to assume what you're hinting at. Are you suggesting that he made it all up? Like, the brain surgery too? Are you suggesting he emphasized his dyskinesia? What?

PD is really a personal disease. "They" say Muhammad Ali has it, but others say that he is just punch drunk. Well I'll tell you something. My mother HATED Muhammad Ali with a passion. In the cruelest of ironies, her disease looked quite similar to his, in comparison to MJF's.

Pope John Paul II was mainly masked and rigid (when in public, anyway) like my mother, until near the end when he had motion problems.

The problem is with the drugs and the way they work (or not). When you don't have enough Dopamine, you become rigid, when you have to much you have all the motion. At some point people frequently can't get the balance correct. I have always assumed that MJF takes extra Dopamine when he's going into public view so that he isn't a statue.

The trade off is, IIRC, that the more you take, it's efficacy becomes reduced, so most docs try to give enough medicine to allow for voluntary movement at a reduced level, rather than either involutary movement (dyskinesia) or slowness of motion (bradykinesia), or rigidity.

Here's a link for you I just googled, it was interesting for a number fo reasons, the least of which was that it looks like it was converted from some other format and several of the key terms are preceeded by the capital letter A and followed by the @ sign, as in Aterm@. Wasn't that early Adobe?

http://www.liebermanparkinsonclinic....t/view/197/25/

[JonathanB]

Or...

People in this country who are financially well off (like. M.J.Fox) can afford better health care, and pay for treatments that might keep them (or make them appear to be) healthier longer.

Those that can't afford decent health care are S.O.L.

[Ron]

Isn't that fair?

Should everyone be entitled to all the best in everything that any amount of money can buy? Should people with more money be allowed to spend it on superior health care, health care that the rest of society won't spend on its self? Or should they be banned from buying more expensive health care? Maybe even ban them from going outside the country to have a medical procedure done.

Would that would be more fair?

Tell me, how much (more than I already) should I pay for someone's healthcare that they refuse to prioritize over their cellphone bill?

Massachusetts actually has an interesting approach -- they have passed universal healthcare here -- and it actually requires people to buy health insurance if they can afford it. The politicians say it's just like driving a car, ya gotta have insurance. No it isn't. You don't have to drive a car, but you do have to breathe.

A problem is the ^%&%^s who "can't afford" insurance (but in reality don't want to pay for it, they want other, perhaps wealthier Americans to pay for it for them) still want to be taken care of if they get sick. Their gamble really pays off; they don't pay for insurance, they spend their money on XBoxes and then when they get sick we take care of them anyway. They ought to be SOL.

So that problem will be taken care of by Massachusetts' illegal-but-probably-won't-be-shot-down-until-they've-collected-a-few-years-of-premiums-then-have-to-tax-"the-wealthy"-to-pay-it-back scheme.

I think that if someone is truly down on their luck, or physically unable to work they should receive "basic healthcare" (of course the bleeding heart liberals will want the to mean "Best that money can buy healthcare") at my expense, and certainly seniors should be helped, so I guess that just makes me a bleeding-heart-conservative.

I also believe that we need to take health care costs out of employment costs to be globally competitive, so we need to move to a national sales tax to pay for healthcare, but that's a discussion for another topic, and how to implement that so that it doesn't become government run healthcare (which is probably impossible) is an even more difficult thread.

[Vin DSL]

People in this country who are financially well off (like. M.J.Fox) can afford better health care...

Okay, Thanks! That's the answer I was looking for -- wanted to make sure it wasn't just me!

Bottom line: PD and/or its' treatment is fatal, unless you're Michael J. Fox, Mohammed Ali, Janet Reno, Adolph Hitler, and so forth...

[Ron]

What are you possibly takling about? He looks terrible in that picture and his disease is still young, he's just moving into the bad part of the progression, and you only see him when he's likely way over-medicated so he can make an appearence in public.

Yet again, Vinny weighs in on something he knows absolutely nothing about.