How do I know JWH is really onto something?
[Updated: May 6, 2020 added an additional link; May 15, 2020 mentioned “centering prayer”; 11/30/20 minor edits; 7/5/21 added link; 7/26/21 added link; 11/2/21 added link; 1/13/22 minor edits; 9/29/22 minor edit; 3/14/24 added link]
For this post, I'll assume you've read the Introduction linked to at the top of the page.
If you're pondering Janice Walton-Hadlock's (JWH) ideas, this post's title is probably one of the first questions you'll grapple with. After all, the Western medical establishment insists there is no cure for PD. Moreover, her ideas, derived from a great deal of clinical observation, have received only limited documentation in the professional medical literature. (e.g., for papers documenting some of JWH's earlier work see here and here)
But I believe too few people with PD have examined that question with sufficient care. One reason appears to be that some folks who are on prescription medications for PD are inclined to dismiss JWH's work out of hand once they read of the potential risks such medications carry for anyone following the approach. Unfortunately, some then go on to respond scornfully to inquiries about the JWH protocol, attempting to steer even those who are not on PD medications away from it.
How might those of us for whom the protocol could be appropriate better approach assessing its merits? Might humans have discovered some health-related truths outside the Western medical research establishment? And might JWH's work be an example of one of these discoveries? The question is not whether every detail in JWH's work is correct. She has revised her ideas before, and they will undoubtedly continue to evolve for as long as she continues her work. For our purposes, what is important is whether she is generally onto something to a degree that makes it worth pursuing her approach. Here's how I see it...
Anyone who concludes JWH is not onto anything important, that her ideas have no validity at all, would have to conclude as well that she is either fabricating stories about all she has seen or is grossly misinterpreting most of what she has seen. I leave it to you to assess the likelihood of either of those possibilities. (e.g., gather information, read over materials including the 2020 edition of Recovery from Parkinson's in which she describes the evolution of her ideas, watch her webinar on the “links” page, listen to her being interviewed, consider possible motives, and weigh the facts before mulling it all over to reach some conclusion.) In my own estimation, the likelihood of either is vanishingly small.
Nevertheless, one might ask why there are not more online reports from those who have recovered via JWH's methods. First, I should mention that a little digging does turn up some reports. They begin with JWH herself as she describes her own recovery from PD in her books. There are of course also quite a number of patients' successful recoveries described at varying levels of detail throughout her texts.
Beyond her writing, there have been a number of cases reported online. I saw mentions of remarkable successes (and some frustrations as well) in the old archives (unfortunately no longer available) of an email support group for those following her protocol. (The group itself lives on!) Available today is this report from a few years ago, before JWH's newer ideas about pause. Another older report of recovery is this comment from 2011. More recent are this blog and this webpage from people who report ongoing or complete recoveries resulting from JWH's newer approach. Update – 7/26/21: Another recent success story is mentioned in this post. Update – 11/2/21: Another is this blogger who has reached the stage of recovery symptoms. Update – 3/14/24 Yet another is this blogger who reports a rapid recovery.
Note that the newer ideas about “pause,” which should benefit a much larger percentage of people with PD, only came to light a couple of years ago. So, much as with this blog, my tentative impression is that we are just beginning to see more accounts of experiences with the newer protocol.
Then there are cases not directly related to JWH's work but which nevertheless lend some support to its validity. For example, when I performed a search along the lines of “miraculous recoveries from Parkinson's,” wondering if there would be common elements to any such reports, two of the first cases to come up prominently were this one and this one. Each features a person who reportedly recovered from PD following what may be seen as a minor variation on the JWH method, involving a history of conversing with a somewhat God-like figure. A third case appears in the medical literature, a case of remission from PD that the authors link to a specific form of meditation. This again provides support for a brain retraining approach. In fact, to my mind, certain elements of the form of meditation involved, known as “centering prayer,” share commonalities with the JWH recommendations, particularly the second of the two core exercises.
Still, it's fair to ask why more people who have recovered have not come forward. JWH discusses this in both the old version and the 2020 version of Recovery from Parkinson's. (see pp. 21-22 of the 2020 version; pp. 215-217 of the 2013 version) (I was able to find the 2013 edition, still available for download, somewhere on her website. Note that it is very much superseded in terminology and concepts by the newest edition. Still, it does contain info that may be of interest to those following her approach.) I leave it to the reader to see the details there.
Suffice it to say that when JWH's recovered patients have returned to their neurologists (or even their own colleagues or friends) to report the news, they've invariably been told their PD diagnosis must have been wrong, that they'd been feigning their symptoms, or even that they were psychotic. With that sort of reaction, it's no wonder many who recover have little interest in further publicizing their stories. This seems especially so in light of the kinds of personality changes encouraged by the JWH protocol. That is, working toward coming off pause, leaving the “Parkinson's personality” behind, seems to me to nudge people in precisely the opposite direction from one in which they would be motivated to debate others about what they had been through. So I suspect many of these folks just go on with their lives.
I see JWH's ideas as a remarkably insightful blend of Chinese medical theory, Western neuroscience, and clinical observation that cannot easily be dismissed, and that offers a very real possibility of recovery. As long as you don't neglect the other low risk things you can do for your PD, it offers an unmatched risk-reward ratio!
Update – 11/29/20: I now have an additional, very substantial piece of evidence supporting the validity of JWH's work. I have my own recent experience with having turned off pause. It was an utterly distinctive, very real, intense, transformative experience, with pervasive impacts, perfectly consistent in many details with what JWH has written about it. In short, it was the most amazing mind-body experience of my life. I don't believe anyone who has experienced pause turning off abruptly could possibly harbor any doubt about the validity of the protocol.
“Stand up and fight back, You got nothing to lose” ~ Jimmy Cliff