Parkinson’s: These Tricks Drastically Improves MobilityA team of Dutch researchers found that some Parkinson’s disease patients were showing remarkable creativity in inventing tricks to improve their own mobility.

But few of the patients were really aware of what they were doing, and neither doctors nor physiotherapists had a systematic list of tricks to recommend to patients.

So these researchers set out to determine which tricks are most effective for improving Parkinson’s mobility.

They published their findings in the journal Neurology.

The researchers recruited 4,324 Parkinson’s sufferers with walking impairments from the Fox Insight Cohort, a study led by the Michael J Fox foundation, and from Parkinson NEXT, a Dutch nonprofit organization dedicated to Parkinson’s research.

All participants were asked to complete an online questionnaire.

All seven types of compensation strategies that the researchers were investigating were rated as effective by those who used them:

1. External cueing: This includes walking to a rhythm that they can either feel or hear, such as a metronome or vibrating socks.

2. Internal cueing: This includes mental arithmetic or any other internal form of self-prompting for next steps or movements.

3. Changing balance requirements to help shift weight: This includes shifting weight without movement before stepping, making wider turns, or using walking aids.

4. Altering the mental state: This includes breathing exercises or other methods to control anxiety and fear of falls.

5. Action observation and motor imagery: This includes copying someone else’s gait or visualizing the intended movement before making it.

6. Adopting a new walking pattern: This includes other forms of forward movement like knee lifting, jumping, running, or walking backwards.

7. Other ways to move forward by using the legs. This includes cycling, skateboarding, or crawling.

But only 3.5% of the participants were familiar with all seven strategies, and 16.7% had never heard of any of them.

Because these compensation strategies are so effective, I encourage you to print out the list above and think of how you can implement them into your routine.

Even more importantly, I’d like to see you halt or even reverse your Parkinson’s progression so that you won’t even need compensation strategies. Thousands of readers have done just that by taking the simple and natural steps explained here…