Page 151 - The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss and Enhance Memory Power

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CHAPTER 15

Alternative Remedies

FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS, my father suffered from Parkinson's disease, a chronic, disabling brain
disorder to which he eventually succumbed. Muhammad Ali, Janet Reno, and Michael J. Fox are
among the prominent people who suffer from this illness. Parkinson's disease is caused by a
deficiency of the neurotransmitter dopamine. The most widely used Western or “allopathic”
treatment, Sinemet, is a combination of levodopa and carbidopa that works by increasing dopamine
levels within the brain. This is by no means a perfect treatment, and at best staves off a few of the
more nasty features of the illness. An episode that occurred early in the course of my father's illness
helps to illustrate one facet of alternative medications in enhancing brain function.

A few years after my father developed Parkinson's disease, during one of my annual visits to my
parents' house, I strolled in to see my mother in her bedroom. She was clad in a faded off-white sari,
her domestic dress as per traditional custom. She sat cross-legged on the floor with two small
mounds of silvery metallic powder laid out on a sprawling piece of paper. She was meticulously
mixing the shiny substances together. She wasn't happy about my intrusion, and quickly tried to wrap
up and hide the telltale material. I immediately guessed what was happening. In her frustration at the
lack of response in my father's symptoms to Sinemet, she had turned to Ayurveda, the ancient art of
medicine laid out in the encyclopedic Hindu texts, the Vedas. The shiny gleam in the metallic
powder made me fear that toxic metals like mercury or lead might be hiding within. During my
medical internship year in a rural setting in south-
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