8 ms·
Michael J Fox: ‘Every step now is a frigging math problem, so I take it slow’
- interestica 6y ago> It is believed that a combination of genetic and environmental factors, such as pesticides and pollution, may cause Parkinson’s; Fox later learned that at least four cast members of Leo & Me, a Canadian TV show he starred in as a teenager, also developed early-onset Parkinson’s. “But believe it or not, that’s not enough people to be defined as a cluster, so there hasn’t been much research into that. But it is interesting. I can think of a thousand possible scenarios: I used to go fishing in a river near paper mills and eat the salmon I caught; I’ve been to a lot of farms; I smoked a lot of pot in high school when the government was poisoning the crops. But you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out.” Completely unfounded speculation, but I always wondered what the effect of the absolutely grueling schedule of simultaneously filming Family Ties and Back to the Future was. (Sleeping in cars, working til 7am, just a couple hours of sleep a night). > Gale said that Fox's youth meant he could cope with less sleep than usual. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future#Filming_with_Fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future#Filming_wit...) They'd already filmed half the movie and brought Fox in as the replacement. With so much on the line, did he take more than just coffee to keep going? Drug-induced 'Parkinsonism' is a thing. Having it progress like typical Parkinson's is rare, but it happens. (https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/information-and-support/types-parkinsonism https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/information-and-support/types-...).
- hobby-coder-guy 6y ago> Completely unfounded speculation So don’t
- melling 6y agoI guess i would say it doesn’t really matter how it happened. His foundation has been working for decades to help find a cure: https://www.michaeljfox.org/ https://www.michaeljfox.org/ Andy Grove (Intel) died from Parkinson’s too: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0128/070.html?sh=252b9495641e https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0128/070.html?sh=252b9495... Linda Ronstadt and Ozzy Osbourne are a couple of other famous people with it.
- arp242 6y agoIt's a small miracle that Ozzy Osbourne is still alive at the age of 71 at all, considering his decades of alcohol and drug abuse were wild and excessive even by "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll" standards. He maxed out on constitution during character creation.
- mariuolo 6y agoHe wrote a book about it (Trust Me, I'm Dr. Ozzy). He basically says "don't do like I did".
- vanderZwan 6y ago> I guess i would say it doesn’t really matter how it happened. Maybe not on an individual level, but if it was (for example) the salmon near the factory then that might affect thousands of people and it would be important to stop this at the source. Tangentially related: I recently learned from a YT interview with James Burke that modern epidemiology was born when John Snow identified the true cause of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak using statistics and an accidental double-blind experiment set-up[0][1]. So I do understand Fox' bewilderment that five people from the same set developing Parkinson's disease is not considered worthy of follow-up research. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUb6Sv-rUv0&t=13m23s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUb6Sv-rUv0&t=13m23s [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...
- influx 6y agoHrrm, interesting theory: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051214084800.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051214084800.h... "Adults who abuse cocaine might increase their risk of developing Parkinson's disease" It wouldn't be too far out to imagine a young Hollywood star in the 80s might abuse illegal drugs to stay awake.
- 1996 6y agoIt seems to me it's of poor taste to accuse someone sick and doing everything they can to help awareness about a disease of abusing cocaine.
- bigmattystyles 6y agoYea, I agree with you. And even if he did, he’s not undeserving of compassion.
- interestica 6y agoIn the article he mentions using illegal drugs and how quitting drinking may have saved his marriage. Do you think it's really that crazy that a young beginning-to-rise star living in Los Angeles in the 80s and under incredible pressure to perform without sleep used something to stay awake? It's not a condemnation.
- Spare_account 6y ago> It's not a condemnation. FWIW I'm inferring from the post you replied to that they think 'drugs are bad' so saying that Fox did drugs in his youth is a condemnation when you have that mindset.
- sokoloff 6y agoSure, but you can’t reasonably restrict your speech such that no one can take your ideas, apply their own strict lens, find some reason for there to be offense using that lens, and then object to your speech on that basis. You’d have a hard time discussing the weather under those rules of conversation. If someone thinks drugs are so bad that an even-handed curiosity whether a particular drug could have been at play is unseemly, the problem is with them, not with the reasonably sanely grounded curiosity. Replace cocaine with alcohol or aspirin and @influx’s comment is the same.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoSleep Disturbance as Potential Risk and Progression Factor for Parkinson’s Disease Emerging evidence from the field of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research implicates sleep quality as an important factor underlying risk and disease progression in this disorder [2, 3]. There is also evidence that the presence of sleep disturbances may increase the risk of developing PD. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6700634/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6700634/ Edit: The mechanism is even partially established. Serious sleep deprivation is known to elevate the levels of two proteins that are known to be risk factors for certain kinds of dementia, one of which is Tau (I don't recall the other): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6360494/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6360494/
- m463 6y agoA close family member had parkinson's. A total of 5 coworkers developed parkinson's disease. There was speculation that some sort of common environmental factor was involved, but there was no medical (or legal) way of determining if or what it was. None of these people had grueling schedules, drug or alcohol problems or outlier lifestyles and all had office jobs. There was some speculation about an office for two of them that had once been a chem lab.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago> A close family member had parkinson's. A total of 5 coworkers developed parkinson's disease. There was speculation that some sort of common environmental factor was involved, but there was no medical (or legal) way of determining if or what it was. For anyone who hasn't seen Dark Waters yet, I would recommend watching it, or at least reading up on the Chemical Industry's shady business practices. Let's just say we no longer use non-stick pans in our household. (This is not to say it has a connection specifically to Parkinson's).
- cannedslime 6y agoNonstick pans are a crazy invention. Heat it up too much and toxic vapors are emitted, vapors strong enough that its not uncommon for parakeets and other small birds to die in such a presence.
- bbarnett 6y agoYup. 100% safe, as long as one never ever heats up teflon beyond a certain point. FDA validated testing, therefore, shows it as safe! Yet who one Earth has never, even for a few seconds, had something happen while cooking. A distraction. A mistake with the heat. An accident requiring attention, a small child taking attention away. One mistake, one moment of error, and now the teflon is toxic. Meanwhile, there are endless warning labels all over packages for absolutely absurd things. Such a bizarre world. What gets me, is that there are all sorts of replacement non-stick coatings. All brand new, all "Oh yes that's perfectly safe!", people happily buying those. Iron or stainless steel for me, thank you.
- btilly 6y agoThere is no need to speculate about what more might have been happening than what was said. For example consider his pot comment. We have known for many years that common herbicides, for example paraquat and maneb, can cause Parkinson's. Sometimes surprisingly quickly. In the 1980s we still used cyperquat which is even more closely related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP which can (when injected) create almost instant Parkinson's. And not only did we use those herbicides, law enforcement specifically used them to target marijuana. So it is quite reasonable that smoking marijuana that had been sprayed with an herbicide could have caused him early onset Parkinson's. If the bad batch was smoked on set at Leo & Me, you've got the whole cluster explained. Or maybe they were unlucky and filmed directly downwind of someone spraying too much herbicide. There are a lot of possible ways that it could have happened.
- hoka-one-one 6y agoHard to believe anything this man says when he intentionally shook the soda before handing it to Larry.
- pqdbr 6y agoThat last paragraph: > Before he goes, I sneak in another question: given that he uses the word in his book’s title, how does he feel about the future now? “I don’t make a lot of plans. I’m a little – I sometimes wonder how… ” he trails off again. Until so recently, he maintained momentum: travelling, golfing with his friends, determinedly moving forward. How is he finding staying still? “Some of those changes are hard. But as limited as I am in some regards, if you’d told me when I was diagnosed that I’d have this life now and do the things that I do, I’d have said, ‘I’ll take it.’ I can move around – it takes some planning, but I can move. I can think, I can communicate and I can express affection. What else do you want?” That's really profound. It's time to get off the computer and call my parents.
- rv-de 6y agoShouldn't you rather continue working to make sure that if such a destiny awaits you, you have enough money to at least buy yourself some comfort? If he wasn't a former successful actor, he couldn't afford "to move around" in his condition.
- sokoloff 6y agoInstead of calling their parents now? That seems a priority inversion to me.
- rv-de 6y agoIsn't that more of a metaphor? I mean how long does it take to call parents? 5 to 10 minutes? You can do it in the lunch break if you have to.
- sokoloff 6y agoI have some sympathy with your perspective and still live my life a lot aligned to that mindset. But the idea that you should wait until a lunch break to do <any actually important life thing> suggests that work and generating income is strictly higher priority than living. For the same reason that you “pay yourself first” to save for retirement, you probably should think even more strictly about how you prioritize your time. So sure it’s a metaphor, but a well-chosen one.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoRe his foundation: I tend to find websites for research foundations frustrating. I always want to know "In a nutshell, what practical solutions have come out of the research you back?" and an answer to that seems to never exist. But their FAQ has some tidbits about them looking for biomarkers and that makes enough sense to me that I was less frustrated than I usually am when I look at foundation websites: https://www.michaeljfox.org/faq https://www.michaeljfox.org/faq And I think this link was somewhere in the article and it gives a good summary of what Parkinson's is all about: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/parkinsons-disease/causes/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/parkinsons-disease/causes/
- rozab 6y agoI would imagine that organisations like this would tend to back riskier research that would struggle to get funding elsewhere. It may be that they back a wide variety of early stage trials, most of which go nowhere. There is a list of funded studies, which is excellent. https://www.michaeljfox.org/funded-studies https://www.michaeljfox.org/funded-studies
- DoreenMichele 6y agoThanks. I'm a former homemaker with a serious medical condition. I also worked at an insurance company for over five years processing accident claims. This involved training in medical terminology and involved reading medical records daily. But I am generally looking for something more "plain English"/layman's terms than the titles on that page. And a guy with a PhD in Chemistry once told me, essentially, "Never read the abstract. It often says something different from the study. Read the study or skip it altogether as a waste of your time." So I would like to live in a world where every research foundation has a page that says something like this (made up example): "We are the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and our research helped develop Hypertonic Saline, a non-drug lung treatment. We were founded in X year and since then life expectancy for CF has gone from about 18 years of age to about 36 years of age. Although a cure is still far off, our work has tremendously improved both survival and quality of life in CF patients (insert more metrics supporting that last statement)."
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoIs the "frigging" here really necessary?
- thatguy0900 6y agoOut of curiosityare you offended by the word frigging or would you rather they just curse?
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoIt adds absolutely nothing and cheapens a potentially valuable message. People don't take you as seriously if your emotional palette is so scarce that you can't form a phrase without dropping a "frigging" in it.
- zo1 6y agoHe has Parkinsons. Let's try to keep that in mind when critiquing his "emotional palette"?
- Rapzid 6y agoWell a fucking math problem sounds like orgy logistics, and a fracking math problem a barrier to natural gas extraction so.. Seems like a good word choice to me.
- JimDabell 6y ago> It adds absolutely nothing It adds tone of voice. It sounds like him when you read it. Sure, he might be able to communicate the level of frustration he feels with “double-plus-ungood” or similar, but it would have a different quality to it. There are benefits to swearing, this is an interesting article on the subject: https://unbabel.com/blog/swearing-language/ https://unbabel.com/blog/swearing-language/
- vagrantJin 6y ago> Thanks to a long and sexist history, Byrne was told, swearing is still seen as a gender transgressive act. “It’s a hallmark of being one of the boys, especially if you’re a girl.” I’ve been told, in multiple occasions, that swearing “is just not ladylike.”... Gender transgressive? This individual has not watched any porn clearly. Joking aside, these type of sweeping statements that make no attempt at clarifying context, or peddling as fact some individuals anecdotal experience - are making the world a slightly more annoying place.
- fefe23 6y agoPeople keep wondering why and how he kept his optimism. Can you imagine how much worse his last 30 years would have been without it?
- Shivetya 6y agoIt certainly takes a special kind of person, being a self starter, someone who always find something to do, and more goes a long way. I watched my father's brother slowly deteriorate from Parkinson's. From losing the ability to ride a motorcycle to even driving. It also affects people in so many different ways, in my uncle's case the later years walking required a conscious effort to stop moving if shuffling ensued. If you stopped him a moment he could start walking properly. Little things that just required a mental reset of certain muscles. A body that knew how to do the motion but occasionally needed a reset. I really don't know if I faced such an issue if I would have the optimism but we can all hope
- person_of_color 6y agoAny startups working on this disease?
- RickJWagner 6y agoHe's inspirational. Michael J. Fox is doing more good now than he ever could have as an actor.
- lumberingjack 6y agoI'm not a trump supporter but anybody who vilifies the man because CNN says so is a loser and completely retarded good riddance to Fox I'm glad he wasn't able to influence too many young minds with that retardation