Fighting Parkinson's...and Winning: A memoir of my recovery from Parkinson's Disease Paperback – November 16, 2017

Ij read the book with gusto. Having the disease it is inviting to read and. re-read its content. There is no cure for this affliction in Western medicine and I am sure there would be no Recipe if the items wouldn't help; 4.500 years or so is ample time to separate wheat from chaff. I am left elated that there is a way to mitigate and cure this crippling ailment.

The mainstream medical community, especially in the United States, considers Parkinson’s disease to be incurable. The disease involves a steady, irreversible loss of brain cells that generate the neurotransmitter dopamine. Drugs and medical treatments, including brain surgery, can alleviate and slow the symptoms, but they cannot stop or cure the disease.In stark contrast, Howard Shifke – the author of this book – completely cured himself of Parkinson’s over a nine-month period by following what he calls a Recipe, concocted largely from Chinese medical principles without using any medications. This book is the fascinating story of his recovery, and the recovery of others over the years afterwards, using his Recipe.The Recipe involves a physical portion and emotional and spiritual portions. The physical portion, aims at healing body parts typically weakened by Parkinson’s according to Chinese medicine: the liver, the kidneys, the blood, and the feet. The techniques of Qi Gong, sound healing, and Yin Tui Na (acupressure) apply here. For the emotional and spiritual factors, he applies meditation and psychotherapy techniques. For instance, stress is a possible cause of Parkinson’s and a factor in recovery, and unnecessary stress is often a result of worrying about things over which one has little control. Shifke’s psychotherapeutic tool for such situations is to just say "okay, that’s the way it is, and I’m not going to fret about it" (page 66). For example, a thunderstorm breaks just as you were about to take the dry laundry off the line; "okay."With only a bit of tweaking later, the whole Recipe was created by Shifke in only one week after his diagnosis. This same Recipe has cured six people (five besides Shifke) so far. I believe this Recipe is an amazing feat of creativity and insight given the slow pace of medical research in general.A commitment to the Recipe isn’t to be taken lightly, however. Although it is broken up to keep interest high, the total time commitment is over an hour per day, seven days a week for months or years. Clearly, a victim of Parkinson’s would need a great amount of fortitude to pursue this cure.The book is designed as an easy cover-to-cover read, but this makes it difficult to find particular topics later. For example, if you want to know what Shifke has to say about "okay," the gallbladder, or Tai Chi, you may have difficulty. The book is organized into front matter, three parts, and two appendices. There are no chapters, no index, very few headings, and the running heads are weak. In place of an index, you could buy the Kindle Edition and use Kindle’s search function.After a very short Introduction outlining Shifke’s life before he was diagnosed, Part One describes his life during the nine months while he had Parkinson’s; if you have any doubt whether he had a real case of the disease, read this part. Part Two is the meat of the book. It covers the Recipe in detail, especially the emotional and spiritual portions of the Recipe (the physical portion, being more straightforward, is covered in Appendix Two). Part Three covers his life from recovery until the book was written – seven plus years. The most interesting portions of this part for me were the stories of the five known other people who were cured over this period; see pages 131, 133, 148, 163, and 185. Appendix One is a daily journal that Howard kept in great detail for the initial portion of his recovery; he ended the journal after a month and a half as his handwriting became so poor (due to Parkinson’s) that even he could not read it. Finally, Appendix Two presents the physical portion of the Recipe in detail. However, some of the exercises were hard for me to follow because there are no diagrams to illustrate the Qi Gong motions. Fortunately the same material appears in his website (I can't give it here, but Google on "Howard Shifke") with videos of the more complex movements.If you have anything to do with Parkinson’s, this is a must-read book. If your reading time is limited and you have the disease, read at least Parts One and Two, Appendix Two, and page 175; then balance the probability of recovery and the time commitment against the outcome if you do nothing. If you decide to move forward with the Recipe, both the patient and caretaker should read the whole book and get the Kindle Edition for an index. If you are related to or are the caretaker of a Parkinson’s patient, read at least Part One. And if you are a medical provider, Part Two will probably provide the greatest value.Although there are a few individual, poorly substantiated claims of curing Parkinson’s, this is the only one I know of that has cured multiple identified individuals of this “incurable” disease. We owe Howard a great deal of gratitude for his generosity in sharing his Recipe with us here and on his extensive website (see above). His Recipe is likely to be the best cure available over the next decade.

The author described an incredible journey of recovery from Parkinson's disease, which is widely regarded incurable. The recipe he provided, although extremely unconventional, may help patients with Parkinson's disease and their care givers find alternative approaches to alleviate symptoms. The ingredients in general agree with an active, positive, and healthy life style, and therefore presumably would enhance the quality of life of patients. The strength the author recaptured in this book, both physical and psychological, was extraordinary and deserved a standing ovation.

I always like to compare the worst review with the best review. Many times you will see just what is on these reviews so far, all positive and then wehave the one worst one all by itself!! It really does not even seem like this person read the book. They maybe were aware of some previousevents in the authors life and are being mean spirited! Because Howard is very open in writing about these issues in the past. If they had actually read the book, they would know that after the author's healing, hetried to bring 5 other Parkinson's organizations the info in the book for a formal test study including The Michael J. Fox Foundation, and none ofthem were interested! Now, who is really trying to help others with healing, if you read this book you will see, it is Howard Shifke, the author!! So forthe person who wrote the worst review of this book, I gather you have never had an unfortunate event in your life ever, and you have missed theopportunity for what blessings can come from these types of events in life! Maybe your day is coming and then you will relate to the others who havebeen blessed already!Now for those who are searching for true help and healing, this book is where you will find it!! My husband is dealing with Parkinson's and has sinceAugust 2011, and we have followed our belief in the body losing it's balance and it can be found with work and determination. We never found the need to have western medicine tell us he has parkinson's, because the body showed us all along in it's expression with symptoms. We, therefore,have only supported his body with different eating plans to see what his body responded best to, as we all are our own beings and foods can varyfrom benefiting in different ways for each of us. We have used alternative modalities again to see what resonated the best for my husband and have eliminated some along the way and continued with others. We have also used trial and error supplementation to assist in supporting his healing.The one thing for my husband that was hard to wrap his head around was the mindfulness practices that truly do help, and this resonated withhim after anxiety was tough on him this past Christmas. We had started reading the book, but had not finished, and had read much of the website that Howard does a wonderful job with for helping others at any level of support they choose for their own journey with Parkinson's. So my husbandsaid lets review again the levels, I am ready, I have been working long enough and I want to completely heal now! So we immediately finished thebook and started with the first 4 sessions consulting with Howard, which have been excellent and well worth it for myhusband and myself in supporting him completely with his healing journey. The book is really helpful in understanding and relating to how the bodycan find the rebalancing it so wants to find for you if it has been disrupted in your life!! We highly recommend the book for those working on healingwhether it is for Parkinson's or any other body rebalancing that is needed. You will find it very inspirational! I actually had a gal contact me thru ebay, of all places, who saw a health item I had sold a month previously, as it was one of the things we eliminated in the protocol, and she was curious why. I wrote right away to her in reply and gave her my email in code on the website, since they block those things, she figured the code out andwas able to write direct to my email instead and I was able to call her. She did not have Parkinson's, but she was dealing with many years of healthissues and in our 1 1/2 hour conversation across the country as we live in California and she lived across the street from the Washington D.C. Pentagon, I shared many things along this healing journey and I highly recommended to her to also read Howard's book for inspiration for her ownhealing journey in rebalancing her body as it truly wants that for her too! Your body wants that too! Blessings, read and enjoy and reach out to Howard if you need support, you will so enjoy his insight most definitely!! Lori C.