Welcome to Stu's Personal Page
I'm moving to beat Parkinson's disease!
I've joined Moving Day, A Walk for Parkinson's, to honor people living with Parkinson's, those who love them and those that are working to end this disease.
Every dollar I raise goes a long way in helping the Parkinson's Foundation fulfill its mission of improving the lives of the one million Americans with Parkinson's. Please support me in this fight by making a donation. Your generosity will help raise awareness, more funding and more understanding of a disease that affects so many of our family and friends.
Together, let's make a life-changing difference!
Thank you!
My Story
Stuart Munro
I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in January of 2019, although in reality, I already knew that I had this condition. I am a psychiatrist who was very heavily involved in the training of medical students.
Sometimes I would present to a wider audience, as I did in March of 2016. My wife, who is a Nurse Practitioner, was in the audience and she could tell that something was not quite right about me...and it was more than just the fact that I was not swinging my arms enough, or not blinking frequently enough. It was that my usually-powerful voice was noticeably diminished and that my command of my own affect, which I had utilized so effectively in the past, was no longer my companion tool. I was no longer able to pull in my audience through modulation of my voice or my facial expressions. My presentation style had become dry and tasteless.
Shortly thereafter, my wife confronted me with her observations. I knew that she was accurate, but my denial levels were so high that I did nothing about the situation for two years. Finally, she was able to appeal to my sense of responsibility to the next generation by pointing out that I owed it to my grandchildren to get an evaluation.
But, as I have said before, I had a pretty strong awareness already about the outcome, based on my years of practicing psychiatry in a public hospital setting.
There, one of our primary interventions was to manipulate (reduce) Dopamine systems of our patients (primarily young men) in order to relieve their psychotic symptoms (hearing voices, paranoid thoughts). We wold inevitably overshoot and induce a (thankfully) reversible Parkinson’s-like symptom picture. So we became very familiar with the clinical readout of insufficient Dopamine in the brain. On that cold, January day in 2019, I remember thinking to myself how perfectly fitting it was that I should suffer from the same clinical condition that I had induced (as an unavoidable treatment side-effect) in so many young men in my career. It was almost amusing...until I realized that my case was irreversible.
It took another couple of years to break through the denial of the impact on my career but I finally did retire in August of 2021. My decision to retire was based largely on my symptoms of PD that had begun to affect my ability to lecture...namely, hypophonia or diminished voice, diminished affect or the inabilult at times, but I am fortunate to have a very supportive family, particularly my wife who is a nurse practitioner. I am not certain where I would be without such a supportive family.
...I also have a group of “Parky Buddies” with whom I work out, five days a week, at a local gym that has staff who are Parkinson’s-informed and who design and lead our workouts with our needs in mind. We are driven by the finding from research that heavy exercise is the only thing that can reliably slow the progression of our shared affliction. And we look forward to our briefly shared moments of sweating together.
I also serve as an ambassador for the Davis Phinney Foundation, which seeks to ensure that everyone with Parkinson’s has the opportunity to live well today, as our founder has done since his diagnosis decades ago when he was an Olympic-level (bronze medalist) cyclist at the time. I also participate in the Parkinson’s Progressive Marker Initiative (PPMI) through the Michael J. Fox Foundation and I have also participated in a number of other Parkinson’s
ity to fully express my emotions, as well as issues with balance, meaning that I am a constant fall risk. Adjusting to this new reality has been diffic
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