Press Kit

Michelle says, “We believe life gives each person the template they need to be well and live in health, no matter their medical diagnosis. The prescription for wellness is inherent in your own life experience. I hope readers will discover tools for finding wellness in their own journey.”
Michelle and Andy are a happy, healthy, and adventurous couple who have discovered how to continue this lifestyle, even through the onslaught of his Parkinson’s. The reader is allowed a unique and intimate view into their unconventional choices and ways of living. Through examining their own life experiences, which have included both the exotic and the mundane, strategies emerge for living well in all circumstances.

They traveled to India, for example, to work at an orphanage where they built a 125-foot suspension bridge. At another time in their life, they sailed a 37-foot trimaran sailboat across the Gulf of Mexico through a major storm. When faced with Parkinson’s, lessons from these experiences buoyed them up. When their art business began to fail or when the fidelity of their marriage was tested, more approaches emerged. Lessons are learned that translate directly when faced with the reality of living with an incurable disease.

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Natural Remedies for Parkinson’s Disease 2005

Because there is no cure for Parkinson’s and because the conventional treatments leave a lot to be desired, like side effects that include death, many of us who have been touched by the disease end up seeking alternative treatments. Though none of us are naive or stupid, we are ALL acutely vulnerable to false claims for remedy and cure. In this quest, as Andy and I chose the alternative treatments that made sense to us, we played the role of fool many times, as we spent our money and energy searching for treatment that claimed it would lessen Andy’s symptoms.
Before delving into all the options we pursued, I’m going to tell the end of the story.

Nothing helped lessen his symptoms except drugs and brain surgery, but without all our attempts with alternative treatments, the drugs and brain surgery would not have worked so well either.
We discovered one of the many positive outcomes of alternative treatment was to slow us down. Alternative treatment kept Andy off drugs for six years, and that bought him time for the risks associated with conventional treatment to ease. We began to understand that many alternative treatments helped to strengthen Andy, the man, but never touched his disease. Also, the drugs helped to suppress and control certain symptoms of the disease but often weakened the man who was taking them. Weakening the man is called having “side effects” and they can multiply and be serious. Andy never claimed Parkinson’s disease as part of his true self. He thought of it more as a circumstance that he had to live with and deal with. Keeping his true self intact was always important in our approach to living with this disease. Yes, alternative treatment slowed him down and also relieved aspects of Andy, the man, that were unwell. They helped him relax and be at peace and to face failures and past trauma that had not been resolved. Alternative treatment reminded him of his true identity as pieces of his true self were healed or strengthened even as Parkinson’s continued to march on. In the later stages of Parkinson’s disability, when Andy’s constant violent shaking made his true self, visually unrecognizable, the alternative treatments touched the man inside and helped him recognize himself which then helped me find him in the Parkinson’s hell. What we learned is that it is ALL needed. There was sham and scam and miraculous healing along both routes.

It took much perseverance and time to pursue alternative therapies. As Andy’s wife, most of that fell to me. Over the years, I was immersed in, among other things, giving treatments, driving Andy to appointments, filling up to 130 capsules a day with herbal powders, reading books, monitoring Andy’s progress, and constantly searching for new ways that might work: while also being the breadwinner and keeping up with life’s daily chores. I realized what I was doing, at the time, but now cannot fathom it at all. It was way too much for one person.
Our alternative journey began with Noel Batten and Janice Walton-Hadlock. They were the first people we learned about who had cured Parkinson’s Disease with natural treatments.
Noel was from Australia and had written a book, a long book, published online and free to be downloaded by anyone interested. We read it.

Andy was not very disabled at this point. We were just getting ready to move back home to New Mexico after living most of five years in Chicago for our daughter’s classical ballet training.
Noel’s book was all about nutrition, exercise, chiropractic alignment, proper rest, and all kinds of lifestyle suggestions.

Andy said, “I feel so relieved that this is going to pass.”
We couldn’t completely ignore the fact that we already followed almost every suggestion in Noel’s book and had made these positive lifestyle choices for most of our lives. It made me wonder to myself, “If doing what we’ve always done is the cure, then what was the cause?” I pushed these thoughts down into the underground of my consciousness and felt hopeful.

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