Category Archives: plasticity

Empower Recovery

In his second book, “Parkinson’s Empowerment Training” author Karl Sterling goes deep into exploring many areas that will help a person with PD to empower recovery, improve the quality of movement, cognition, memory, and life itself.
You will encounter suggestions in my interview with Karl that will provide techniques and methods that offer the opportunity to reverse Parkinson’s symptoms.

He addressed ways to empower recovery including:

  •  Power of hope, empowerment, and beliefempower recovery
  •  The two step process to maximize neuroplasticity
  •  How to get sustained sleep at night
  •  Benefits of using Power Plate and whole body vibration
  •  The multifaceted roles dopamine plays in the body
  •  Techniques to improve memory and cognition
  •  Methods to Improve Gait and Mobility

Robert Rodgers PhD
Founder
Parkinsons Recovery

Road to Recovery from Parkinsons Disease
Olympia Washington

Genes and Plasticity

The interesting thing about genes and plasticity is that if you know what you are doing, you can actually change the DNA and how the body works by changing your perception and not thinking, feeling and believing you are doomed because of your genes.  It is possible.  That is why I like the work of Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza so much – neuroplasticity.

We run our lives based on 90% of subconscious belief patterns and only 10% of conscious thought. That’s why affirmations don’t always work.  Consciously we want to change but we always have the subconscious patterning of –

‘It’s too hard to change, I’m not good enough, I’m not worth loving, I’ve been sick so long no one can help me.’  

 When you are sick, it is not so easy to feel this is possible but people have been able to cure themselves of a lot by changing the neural pathways and subconscious messages.  The way I look at it is that you treat the body and the subconscious at the same time.  

I have also found that turning to one’s spiritual beliefs, whatever they may be,  can also help us to get rid of the old programs of the subconscious too – our belief perceptions that have kept us slaves – by replacing them with unconditional love and acceptance of ourselves.
 
Eva

Brain Plasticity and Parkinson’s Disease

Robert, here is another interesting neurological phenomenon. As I have written before, I am a long time weight lifter and cyclist, which I continue in spite of my PD symptoms. Recently, I was convinced to try skipping rope as a speed, balance, and coordination adjunct to my workouts. Having not skipped a rope for more than thirty years, I was somewhat dismayed to find that I simply could not do it. I just could not coordinate the action of arms and legs and rope to do even one jump over the rope.

Not to be that easily defeated, I determined to “retrain my brain” to skip rope. Each day in the gym, after my regular workout, I spend about ten minutes devoted to rope skipping. The first time I was able to do it, I got up to 5 skips before failing. The next day I did ten, and the next fifteen, and so on, so that after only ten days I was able to do 50 continuous skips; after about two weeks now, I not only do 50 continuous skips, but 50 “step throughs”, and even up to 20 or so high speed skips. This amazes me because what was un-learned over thirty years could be re-learned in just a few days, in just about the same amount of time that it takes a kid to learn it in the first place.

It makes me think that we grossly underestimate and under-utilize our brains. There are millions of unused neural pathways just waiting to fill in for any that may be out of order or overused or abused for whatever reason. It also puts the lie to the conventional notion of “inevitable and continuous degeneration” that is associated with PD. That concept is the primary impediment to continuous re-generation and learning that are the natural condition of the brain (even an injured or malfunctioning brain).

Brad