This is Andy, an early retired anaesthetic manager, who is discussing his personal encounter with Parkinson's disease.
He discusses the types of non-medicinal activities and support that help to alleviate the cramps and pain associated with Parkinson's disease.
Transcript (auto-generated)
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Other than the medication, what sort of stuff helps you? Not an awful lot to be honest. Exercise does help but again that's kind of a double-edged sword because when your medication wears off it becomes painful. So if I'm walking around, if I'm walking out somewhere, everybody walking just for exercise, so you know I'm walking around the village and my medication wears off and I'm sort of you know half a kilometre from home then that gets, you know, all the sort of benefits that I've had from the exercise because it does help. So they turned in the last of the quarter kilometre is quite painful. My head movements quite, my neck gets very sore and when I get so sorry so yeah being able sort of having a high back chair that helps because the movement in my in my head caused by the medication. That's quite, my neck is quite painful. So a high back chair. I've got one of those sort of, you know one of those, I can't, I've got one of those sort of parking lot things that you sort of, the chair tips forward and sort of dumps you out and so mostly. I bought one of those and, well, we bought one of those. It helps, you know, it helps. You know, it's a comfortable chair and I know that I can get up. There's also the other thing that I can't do is if you go to like a restaurant or dinner party, well, not that I go to dinner parties in Greece, but they don't really have Greek, the Greeks don't do dinner parties, they do barbecues. But if you go to like a restaurant, I have to make sure that I can get up in and out of the chair. If the chair is too low, I can't get out. And in the chairs, I have to lift myself out of my arms because of my balance. If I lift myself up with my legs, even though my legs are fairly strong, I have no balance, so I have to secure it with my arms. I have to make sure that I sit in chairs with arms. If you're walking into a restaurant and the food looks great, but the chairs have no arms, I can't go in. It sounds absolutely ridiculous but it's true because I'll never get off a chair. I'll never get, I'll never get off a chair. So yeah, what else helps? Showering helps, actually. Warm water helps. That kind of helps. That kind of relieves the cramps. A nice cheeky beer every now and again. That helps quite a lot.
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