Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::November 10, 2003

Worth repeating

Morton Kondracke, co-host of Fox’s The Beltway Boys, is the author of Saving Milly: Love, Politics and Parkinson’s Disease, an account of his wife’s six-year battle with Parkinson’s. He spoke on Nov. 3 at the Regenerative Bioscience Symposium. Some excerpts:
“[Milly was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1997.] It was a horribly shocking diagnosis for her because she had been a psychiatric social worker working with that neurological disease. She’s now totally disabled--unable to swallow. She’s basically a prisoner trapped in her own body. So there’s nothing I won’t do to fight Parkinson’s disease. It’s been the scourge of our lives. And yet it’s given us purpose as well.
“Parkinson’s disease alone costs the country $25 billion in medical care, lost productivity, custodial care for those serious cases, etc. Add to this the cost of ALS and Alzheimer’s and you get into hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
“There are exciting things happening on the Parkinson’s front. Thanks largely to Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali, Parkinson’s is now what you might call a ‘hot’ disease. . . And there’s great scientific progress being made in Parkinson’s--gene therapies, treating the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease both surgically and medically, and of course the research that is going on here in stem cells. . . .
“I have a chapter in my book that’s called God’s work, by which I mean the healing of disease. All of you who are involved in medical research are doing God’s work. And there’s lots more of it to do.”

--Cat Holmes

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