Take Charge of Parkinson's Disease: Dynamic Lifestyle Changes to Put YOU in the Driver's Seat [Paperback]

Blurb: Guidelines to Taking Charge of YOUR Parkinson's Disease
Take Charge of Parkinson's Disease: Dynamic Lifestyle Changes to Put YOU in the Driver's Seat is for everyone affected by PD--those with the disease, families, and caregivers. With its focus on a healthy lifestyle that emphasizes nutrition and exercise as a way of maintaining optimal health, the book will appeal to readers who want to emphasize wellness and healthy aging while living with Parkinson's disease.
Motivated by her husband Mike's PD, Anne Mikkelsen developed a cooking style that blends her training in traditional French cooking and love of plants with emerging science on the importance of brain-healthy fruits, vegetables, spices, and herbs. Mike, an award-winning potter and sculptor, has skillfully adapted his art to accommodate the advancing stages of PD. Together, over nearly three decades, they have overcome the obstacles of living with Parkinson's disease in a fashion that will be an inspiration to readers.
Healthy lifestyle recommendations and an extensive recipe section are interspersed with Anne's memoir of her journey with her husband as they discover how to live well with Parkinson's disease. A chapter on issues of caregiving and the challenges it presents to a relationship enhances the comprehensive coverage of living with PD.

What Stephanie Thought: Half memoir and half health guide, Take Charge of Parkinson's Disease is a thoughtful, easy-to-follow book stuffed with information about Parkinson's Disease, uplifting personal stories, and many clever recipes to help you through a healthy-as-possible lifestyle. With a history of Parkinson's Disease on my father's side, I thought this book would be useful to keep on hand. Although Parkinson's Disease affects mainly middle-aged and elderly adults and is very rare in individuals less than thirty years of age, it's still important to be informed on such topics. I'm obviously too young to be concerned about Parkinson's in myself, but the book was extremely descriptive, and is one of those books I should keep for the future (for my dad, uncles, and aunts).

Parkinson's Disease has no known cure, which is why a book to facilitate a lifestyle with the disease is a godsend. I especially loved all the recipes to promote a healthy lifestyle that were included at the end of the book. Even though Mikkelsen is not a doctor, she has studied French cooking, owns restaurants, and hosts cooking shows; she clearly knows what she's doing. I am eager to start using the foods recommended and incorporating them into my diet. Like I said, I'm too young to be concerned with PD, but with these things, you can never be too early.

Stephanie Loves: "Foods Tools to Keep Stocked in Your Pantry: olive oil, lemons and limes, teas and coffee, pepper, sea salts, cucumbers, onions, rosemary, nutmeg, kidney beans, nutrient-dense legumes, black beans, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, canola oil, chickpeas, raspberries, fava beans, and edadame."

Where Stephanie Got It: LibraryThing for review.

Radical Rating: 8 hearts- Would recommend to lots of really good friends.

My husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's 6 years ago. We found the book to be very well written and found it interesting how many of their experiences mirrored many of our own experiences. It was good to read about how they've dealt with this disease, which has helped us/me better understand and cope with it ourselves. A must read for not only people who have PD, but their family members.

Take Charge of Parkinson's Disease: Dynamic Lifestyle Changes to Put You in the Driver's Seat, Anne Cutter Mikkelsen (with Carolyn Stinson), DiaMedica Publications, New York, 224 pages, January 2011, $14.95.

This book tells a story of a special and even loveable couple who are thrust into living anew by the husband's Parkinson's Disease (PD) diagnosis. While there's considerable medical information in the book, it's all seamlessly folded into the story of the couple, told by the wife Anne, as the couple meanders through the new ingredients of their life with PD. Anne is masterful at capturing and expressing her inner thoughts, her musings, reverie, and spiritual moments, all of which give the book its attractive and engaging personal flavor. While Anne is clearly her husband's champion, she never forfeits her uniqueness (which is ever-apparent) to the PD. Paradoxically Anne embraces the PD; the story of her unique embrace seems to magically transform PD into a life accelerator and animator rather than the opposite. Anne's perception is compelling; I was so captured by it that I developed the impression that the PD was not simply her husband's; it belonged to them both. We experience the presence and the effects of PD through Anne's eyes as an artist, her mind as an insightful wisdom figure, her heart as a faithful lover, and her hands as an accomplished chef.

The book is sprinkled with little snapshots of meaningful incidents that each sparkle as a new facet of self-discovery. Food gives energy to the book as Anne garnishes each new insight with a recipe, as though the new thought and the recipe somehow belong together and support each other. Recipes are not plopped into the text; rather each is delicately placed in interpersonal settings, each portraying slight shifts in the couple's ever-evolving relationship, all with PD as the backdrop, but never the story driver.

I loved the journey this book brought me on; I delighted in its intimacy, I learned a lot about mind-healthy foods, about shifting life priorities, about the healing power of good food well fashioned and presented, about life lived simply, and about the sustaining might of love, swirling together in the vortex of PD. The book changed me, certainly it changed my perception of PD, but more than that it inspired me. The inner fruits of Anne's labors of love are the food that this book offers to the reader. By the book's end Anne's husband is still greeting life with vitality even 20 years beyond the original diagnosis of PD. His triumph is Anne's success, an internal testimony to her tenacity, courage, wisdom, simplicity, spirit, and tenderness.

This book is a gentle teacher. It certainly teaches the person with PD a new emotional and attitudinal posture with his/her caregivers and loved ones. But even more, this book teaches those same caregivers and loved ones that PD is not an end-game, but a start-game for living a new creatively loving life for its own sake, accenting being over doing, for looking closer at the "who" of me, and not simply the "what of me." Everyone touched by PD, however direct or oblique, will find this book a treasure they will read and reread many times.

Richard P. Johnson, Ph.D.
Clinical Director
Spiritual Strengths Cancer Care Center