If you don’t know anyone with Parkinson’s you will soon enough.
I have enough friends and acquaintances with Parkinson’s that I have suggested maybe working dogs leads to Parkinson’s. Bad joke, I know, but that’s how prevalent this disease is as the population ages.
This BBC documentary has been described as “possibly the most powerful documentary you will see this year.”
It’s another terrific piece of illuminating service work from Jemima Harrison, the creator of Pedigree Dogs Exposed.
Pass it on. Research in this area saves lives — maybe your own.
It seems trite to hail the brilliance of the documentation of immense suffering, but there it is: The Parkinson’s Drug Trial: a Miracle Cure? (BBC Two), which followed four brave, tragic, funny individuals through a drug trial they hoped would cure their Parkinson’s disease, was one of the most powerful documentaries you will see this year.
The premise was as follows: desperate to find a way of halting the grim progression of their Parkinson’s disease, 42 people volunteered in 2012 for a risky trial of a surgical procedure in which a high dose of a naturally occurring protein called glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) was to be injected deep into their brains. The show focused on four of those people, along with the doctors in charge of the procedure, during the selection process for the trial and its first half.
After Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s is the world’s second-most common neurodegenerative disease. The stakes of this trial were high, but the show’s sharp focus on the four individuals made this abstract horror into one that was overwhelmingly and heartbreakingly intimate.
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