I recently interviewed Cameron Hermansen, a person with a Parkinson’s Diagnosis, for my Recovery Stories series.
During the discussion, a “teaching moment”, and an opportunity to tell the truth about what I discovered about chronic illnesses, arose. I felt it was worth sharing this part of the discussion here, in case others benefit from me in the “educator” role. The transcript is below.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion built on 8 years of working with People with Parkinson’s - find your own truth :-) Are we mammals with full-blown instincts - or are we above that?
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Transcript
LS: So have you ever investigated the relationship between adrenaline and dopamine?
CH: No, I haven't.
LS: So how do you think it's related? That's a trick question because I'm now finding a picture around it.
So what do you think?
CH: I mean, hypothetically, I think they would be inverses of each other as the more adrenaline you have, the lower the dopamine.
LH: Are you ready? I'll share my screen and see if you get the same shock as I did
What do you think about this?
CH: I mean, that does mean that dopamine turns into... eventually turns into, it's converted into adrenaline. So you use up your dopamine by, is that what that means?
LS: The more dopamine [supplements/pills] you eat/take, the more adrenaline you'll get.
CH: Say that again, say that again?
LS: The more dopamine [supplements] you eat/take, the more noradrenaline, the more adrenaline.
CH: Oh, so the dopamine you eat, you mean taking meds? [Lilian comment: Sorry, we can use both words in Danish]
LS: Taking meds leads to... Adrenaline. And adrenaline is...
CH: It's like a vicious cycle. It's... Oh, holy cow. I've never seen that. Why?
LS: I'm a biologist, but I learned this already in high school. When I saw this the first time, I nearly fell off my chair.
And I have for two years, I've studied how I could help people with trauma reduction. I found what I call the four strategies to better health. Then, for some reason, I wanted to study a little more about dopamine and I get this and I did exactly the same as you. I fell nearly off my chair.
So what's the conclusion here? Can you come to the same conclusion as me?
Buy my HOPE-shortcut course, which teaches the four strategies.
When my book comes out I will raise the price.
So now is a good time to buy.
CH: Yeah. Well, if adrenaline is damaging to the brain, the more Dopamine you take, and it would make sense, the worse your outcome is going to be. They don't want to say that because it…, but I've noticed that personally, that if I know that there are days that I am so relaxed…
I remember this Christmas time, Christmas is big in the United States, and I remember being safe and with my family and everything. I didn't even need my medication.
LS: You have eaten your medication. Your symptoms have got worse. Not now, but later [because l-dopa is not only the precusor to dopamine, but also for adrenaline].
CH: Yes.
LS: So you are together with me, in what can we say, inventing or exploring the root cause for Parkinson's and the solutions to Parkinson's. But what you have seen right now, dopamine [supplements/pills] is the nearly worst thing you can eat if you want to reduce stress hormones.
CH: That is nuts. I don't know how more people don't know. The problem is, is it's not convenient because I find a lot of people who have Parkinson's want to just take a pill.
LS: Of course. That's why I'm a little hesitant with all your [nutritional interventions] they are probably, good and fine, and maybe most of the population needs it, I don't know. But if people can get a pill, they would forget everything else we have told about Wim Hof, about trauma and stress and childhood trauma, and take the pills. And trust me, there will also be someone who didn't need it and still has Parkinson's.
CH: That gives me even more motivation to really...
LS: Reduce medication, I hope. Because stress is your symptom. It's what pushes you into fight, flight, and freeze. And you have a little tremor and some stiffness in one of the sides. So part of your body is in freeze, and adrenaline, every time you have anxiety, every time you're stressed at work, every time you think back to your childhood or get triggered, you are pushed into fight, flight, and freeze. And every time you take a pill of [l-dopa] dopamine, you get more [adrenaline].
CH: That is really powerful. That just changed my whole…
LS: But just please don't drop the medication from one day to another. You have tried that. So it's slowly and cut with a knife or pill cutter slowly, slowly in the next three months or so, but you don't need it. Trust me with the little symptoms you have got now, you will probably become better because you have, in my mind, you have found the key to Parkinson's and it is stress reduction. You have dealt with a lot of the earlier traumas.
You have the door open to the, can we call, new world that you can work with yourself you do it with a cold exposure, but you also have a lot of things going on with mindfulness and awareness of your past and how it has influenced you.
So you don't need the dopamine. If you, during the next three months, where you reduce, something comes up you already have the tool. You check out if you get more symptomatic tomorrow or in a week, you think what was going on today?
Then we had a problem with how to get this and this tractor or this and this repairman and say “That was the stress” or “It was my mother's birthday” or something. Then you have something to work with. Because you have opened the door to this mental …. where body and mind are one and the mental has space even if we right now call it a physical disease.
CH: When I was diagnosed… I have this goal because modern medicine says that there's nobody that's ever really had a [negative] DAT Scan that I'm aware of that's actually recovered from Parkinson's.
LS: I have one client
CH: Do you?
LS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. (One of my first clients had his Diagnosis canceled)
CH: Well, that's the thing is I'm going to be your second client. At least that's my goal.
LS: Sounds good. But be fast because I have a handful that is ...
CH: That's on the way?
LS: Yeah, yeah.
CH: No, you are a sweetheart. No, I'm so thankful that I did this thing. But I think that's the key. Parkinson's, I believe, is a mental disorder with some physical components. But number one, at least my disease, is a mental disorder. When you're 10 years old and you think about dying, I mean, that's not healthy.
LS: That's where your foundation was made to the disease many years after.
CH: Yes, yes. I think you're right on, because they have been trying….. You heard Michael J. Fox 20 years ago saying that in 20 years, they'll have the disease beat. But how do you beat a disease that's a mental disorder? You can't unless you change the way you think and have hope. I think depression is basically hopelessness.
LS: Yeah, and you know that's what I found out that that was the main thing, the difference between the guys that were stuck and the guys that helped themselves to no symptoms. It was the hope. And that's why I name everything I make with HOPE and Shortcut. I have spent 10,000 hours finding all this out with my clients, studying the internet. So that's the shortcut that you don't have to spend 10,000 hours. You can jump directly onto my shoulder or
's shoulders who have found out the same.CH: Well, you are amazing. You've got it figured out. You can't take a pill and say, “oh, I'm not going to get rid of this trauma”. You can't. So if people want to be well, they need to do it the hard way.
LS: The good thing is there's a lot of different ways how you can do it. You have used a strong tool like plunging in cold water. That's a strong thing.
I call it exposure therapy. I do it a more mild way, digging into the traumas and solving them. But it's also possible, for example, to do a lot of exercise where you use the real way, how animals do it.
Animals have traumas as well because, that's actually one of our superpowers it's how we remember very important things don't go into that cave because that's where the lion is sleeping, and that's why when we see certain things we back off or if you see the bully from your school, you get a shock. That's because we don't want to go there. That's your superpower, but in a modern world, we are so passive sitting on our chairs. Our nature is not built to that. So all the stress builds up and builds up and builds up and becomes physical.
If you have a dog on the leash or maybe a horse, they start to have tremors as well, because if they see a bigger dog or an angry dog, they either want to go and compete, fight it, or want to run away from it. So, domestic animals on the leash that cannot escape, they got Parkinson's symptoms as well.
CH: It's funny because I don't have a tremor other than when I'm super stressed. I have to be extremely stressed. I never have a tremor that isn't stress-induced.
LS: That's what tremors are.
CH: My mind is so accustomed to it. If you step back and look at the times that I start tremoring, it's in times of great stress. It may not be life-threatening, but it is… But you're right. It's crazy.
LS: Your brain, doesn't navigate with what your logic is saying is life-threatening or not. It says, is this cold water? Yes, it's life-threatening. I stress myself out. It senses something is going on in his surroundings that is life-threatening because it looks like your bully in first grade, or something's going on in your company that makes you move very fast around. Then your instincts say there's a tiger next to this guy who's running fast already.
So to put it a little simply, it's how we work. It's how we have used millions of years to navigate wildlife, but now we're just sitting.
CH: That makes a lot of sense because they can never actually figure out why exercise is so beneficial. Because there's not really a physiological reason why exercise… but if it's using up adrenaline, like you say…
LS: It's doing what we are meant to do if there's somebody after us. It's running. The body cannot tell the difference if you are biking or running or whatever you are. Like fighting, it's also boxing. It's, you can say, the fight types that want to fight the enemy. So sport, any intensive sport is going into our instincts.
CH: That is so powerful, even with the weight training, because I do feel good doing weight training, and it goes back to using up.
LS: They're still using up the adrenaline. If you during an hour consistently doing some sort of thing, you get sweaty, you get tired, and so on. So not that I'm an expert on weightlifting, but of course it uses up your adrenaline if you do it for a longer period.
CH: You've got a key there. Every Parkinson's patient needs to have that explained to them.
LS: I spent three years, I used to say I used 10,000 hours to find out this and connect the dots across the animal kingdom and human, history.
CH: Did you figure that out about the adrenaline?
LS: That was the first I figured out that people who have helped themselves and for some reason have the energy to put it on a webpage. I read all their stories about how they healed themselves. Some took this supplement, others took another supplement, some did therapy, and some did meditation. So I had to read a lot of them and it was not easy to see the commonalities, but I could see that there were a lot of things that reduced stress in all of them. So I've found across all these people, I found these different, and I call it the four strategies on how to help yourself reduce stress.
Buy my HOPE-shortcut course, which teaches the four strategies.
There are many ways and Parkinson's world has found out some of them that dancing is good biking is good and boxing is good. They have found line dancing is good, waltz is good and ballroom dancing is good. All dancing is good but only if you like it .
CH: yeah, it would be the opposite for me.
LS: Okay, for you it will induce stress, so you have found other ways so that was why I find everyone needs to find their own antidote. If you don't like dancing, forcing you to do dancing is doing the exact opposite. If you hate biking or running or weightlifting, that's not the cure. But if you find something you fancy... There are so many, you can look up nearly any activity and see - even chess, you can find a study that it's benefiting people with Parkinson's. So I figured these patterns out and why each of them works or rather what's the groups of things. I can nearly put any activity and say, “yes, that belongs to that group (one group of strategies), that belongs to that group, that belongs to that group.”
So one group we have talked about today is working with your mental health and reducing old traumas. You can even say that the cold water plunge it's a little in family with trauma therapy because it's exposure therapy,
CH: yes, you're basically saying you're okay because you know you're okay.
That's exactly what it is and it's not about the physiological part it's the same because once I relax and I feel like I'm okay, then it's not hard.
LS: Sure. Exposure to danger. But it wouldn't work for everyone.
CH: That's why I think if you can control your mind, you can figure out what works for you. I actually have a sauna, so I do it on the other side. But it's exposure saying, you know, I'm okay. Because that's ultimately what I want. If I could ask for one thing with my Parkinson's and one doctor to tell me that I am okay.
LS: But you are okay. You are not diseased. You are just stuck in your instincts for too long during the day and a little stuck in your dopamine. But you can slowly step out of that and whatever symptoms come up afterward, you can deal with that and say, okay, now I get a little stiffness whenever one of my employees is ill or whatever is going on. You can take the problem and solve that.
Sometimes it's something in you “here and now.”[Stressors from your dailyday]
Sometimes you have to go back to your past and solve out why are you so easily getting obsessed with things, to use a word you have used a couple of times. It's our natural instincts that are pushing us into fight, flight, and freeze.
In modern culture, we have not learned how to get out of it. The solution is what I call the four strategies. You have yourself found a handful of activities that fit in with this.
Buy my HOPE-shortcut course, which teaches the four strategies.
