Integrative Medicine

I recently met with Aly Cohen, MD in my initial appointment for one hour, bringing with me pages of questionnaires that I had filled out beforehand. I had also my blood test from this year, my food allergy test from 2010 and the intuitive healer's diet recommendations from the year before. The questionnaires she looked at before she called me into the examining room, and had highlighted certain parts.

one of my colored pencil drawings

Doctor Cohen is young, at least compared to me, and energetic, bright and well informed about environmental and dietary effects on autoimmune diseases. She is also a rheumatologist. She is editing a book with Andrew Weill, the alternative medicine guru, and has a website called The Smart Human and a Facebook page of the same name where she regularly posts tips on healthy living.

http://www.alycohenmd.com/the-smart-human-.html

A lot was crammed into that one hour, questions from her, history from me and then recommendations. She had a Parkinson's Protocol  developed with Dr. Weill that contained supplements for my population. I bought from her ones she had on hand and she gave me also some starter quantities of ones she did not have to sell. A total of 9 supplements, one was a good multi-vitamin, some common vitamins such as E and C and others were more obscure to me such as Ubiquinol and Alpha-lipoic Acid. The dosages are important, many are high dosages.



The tenth supplement was Melatonin for sleep, one important factor in healing that I am not getting enough of. She recommended in this case a very low dosage, 1/2 of one milligram pill.

Other than supplements, she recommends for Parkinson's a diet with lots of vegetables, fruit, meat if desired, nuts, and seeds, that is low in carbs, sugar, dairy, wheat and other gluten foods.

As for the rest, the recommendations for drinking clean water, exercise and emotional health, I am doing what I should. Though I have stress in my life, one of the factors that creates illness, I have some strategies, and plans for more if necessary to help me. I use a Berkey water filter, and am working out 3X/week at the boxing gym (see my last post). The conclusion she made was that I am a healthy woman EXCEPT for the one little glitch - not so little - PD.



PD is a fight I am taking on more in earnest now that it is surfacing above the meds, necessitating more pills and hence the onset of side effects. I have another appointment with Dr. Cohen in 6 weeks. By then I will have introduced each of the supplements and have had 2 months of boxing. There is more I could do, and converting my diet is one of those things.




I will do what I can. I have not been very disciplined in some things. The trick is to find ways to get myself to work on them. Slow work, stubborn habits, weak will. It's not easy. The support of a trusted MD could be the key.