Parkinson’s Group focus on facets of improving health
Pictou County Parkinson’s Support Group member Janet Stalker believes the conversations members have when guests speak at the group’s monthly meetings are valuable to everyone in the county affected by the disease.
“We pick up bits and pieces of information from each other, and it’s such a great support system,” said Stalker, who suffers from the neurodegenerative disease. “You see a lot of people who lost friends and relatives to Parkinson’s who still attend these meetings, and that’s great to see.”
Stalker was one of many members of the group at the Community Room at Atlantic Superstore on Tuesday afternoon, listening to advice from David MacLellan, a pharmacist who spoke about the need to holistically maintain health — and of the many dimensions of health that can be affected by Parkinson’s.
“The big thing I learned about Parkinson’s disease is that we only think about how it affects a person’s movement, but it affects mental health, digestive health and social lives,” said MacLellan. “There are so many components that you have to look at.”
MacLellan described a number of strategies in the personal initiative to improve health. He invited members of the group to depart from the traditional twodimensional focus on diet and exercise in the efforts to improve health, indicating that there are a number of approaches.
MacLellan noted the best way to improve involves five main categories: staying socially active, changing how you think about aging, staying physically active, taking care of your mental health and lifelong learning.
MacLellan recommended an assortment of strategies to slowly ease into a more active lifestyle, whether that’s “walking to the mailbox every morning” or taking a fitness class, taking up hobbies and, most important, engaging in the community with a healthy social life.
MacLellan emphasized the importance of the latter, noting that healthy social interaction encourages the production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter deficient or in some cases entirely missing in people with Parkinson’s.
MacLellan also praised the utility of positive thinking and a gratitude mindset, the knowledge of when to ask for help with mental illness, and the need not to rush too quickly into any specific plan.