Champ’s doctor retiring
Dr. Lieberman will retire from Ali Parkinson Center
Dr. Abraham Lieberman, the neurologist who persuaded Muhammad Ali to embrace a role of raising awareness about Parkinson’s disease, is retiring.
Muhammad Ali did not want to be the face of Parkinson’s disease.
He was The Champ, The Greatest, an elite athlete. He wasn’t an illness.
But if anyone could persuade the cocky heavyweight boxing legend to embrace the progressive neurological disease that was causing his slurred speech and deteriorating physical condition, it was neurologist and friend, Dr. Abraham Lieberman.
The two forged a bond over years of appointments, consultations and conversations. Eventually, after persistent cajoling from Lieberman that involved both a house call and a poem — yes, a poem — their connection led to the 1997 founding of the Muhammad Ali Parkinson and Movement Disorders Center at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoeretire nix.
Ali and Lieberman remained friends and confidants until Ali’s 2016 death in Scottsdale at age 74.
Next month, Lieberman, 80, plans to from his work treating Parkinson’s patients.
He’s leaving behind a center that grew over two decades from one room in a community hospital to a global clinic that has 14,000 annual patient visits and occupies the entire third floor of a Barrow Neurological Institute building on West Thomas Road on the Dignity Health St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center campus.
“He was a doctor to Muhammad, but he also befriended him,” Ali’s widow, Lonnie Ali, told The Arizona Republic. “It was a little bit more than being his doctor . ... Muhammad trusted him implicitly.”
Staff members at the Muhammad Ali center are driven by a mission that came directly from its namesake:
To give all patients with Parkinson’s disease the same kind of high-quality treatment that Muhammad Ali always received throughout the course of his illness, regardless of their ability to
pay.
That means that at the Ali center, patients can get all their Parkinson’s care in one place, whether it’s counseling, physical therapy, family support or medications.
Research suggests about 60 percent of Parkinson’s patients experience depression, anxiety or apathy. The center has always put a big emphasis on helping patients and their families adjust after a diagnosis.
There’s still no cure for Parkinson’s disease — the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s. But center officials say they are working hard to change that.
Right now, the center has six studies underway examining therapies that could slow down progression of a disease that affects about 1 percent of people older than 60. By age 80, that percentage rises to 4 percent, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
It’s less common, but Parkinson’s affects younger people, too. Lieberman has Parkinson’s patients who are in their 20s and has cared for patients with Parkinson’s who go through pregnancies.
Ali was diagnosed with Parkinsonism — signs and symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease — at age 42.
Yet, he may have been showing symptoms for years beforehand.
In “Ali,” his 2017 biography of the boxer, author Jonathan Eig cited an Arizona State University study he co-authored that found Ali’s ability to articulate words declined “significantly” between ages 25 and 40,
Eig and others have written about Ali’s boxing and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain condition caused by repeated blows to the head. CTE has been linked with dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
Although years of getting his head punched in the boxing ring put him at higher risk of developing Parkinson’s there’s no definite proof that it was boxing that caused his illness, researchers at the Phoenix Parkinson’s center maintain.
Signature symptoms of the disease include tremors, voice changes and slow movements. The disease affects at least 10,000 Maricopa County residents, the Parkinson Network of Arizona says.
“We didn’t want this to look like a hospital facility. There are pictures on
“It had Muhammad’s name on it and because of that (Dr. Lieberman) felt it had to be the best, to do the best and to be there for every Parkinson patient.”
the walls, the colors are nice,” Lieberman said. “Lonnie knew from Muhammad that you had to have a taller chair, so some of the chairs are higher, so that you don’t have to catapult yourself out. She was very involved in picking the furniture.”
For patients who can’t make it there physically, the center has a broad program of providing health care and education via computer teleconferencing in both English and Spanish.
“It had Muhammad’s name on it and because of that (Lieberman) felt it had to be the best, to do the best and to be there for every Parkinson patient who needed help,” Lonnie Ali told the
“I have no doubt this center will continue to grow and help a vast number of people and continue to make Dr. Lieberman proud. He made sure of that. That’s why he’s 80 and just retiring.”
Lieberman says age and health are driving his decision to retire. He had polio as a child and was for a time paralyzed below the waist. He mostly recovered, except for a lingering limp.
About 18 years ago, he developed a progressive disease called post-polio syndrome, which required him to use a medical walking stick. He now uses two. In 2015, he gave up directorship of the center to neurologist Dr. Holly Shill; in December he’ll leave the center for good.
“It’s hard to get around. I can’t really walk distances. At my retirement party I was in a wheelchair,” said Lieberman, who came to Arizona from New York in 1988. “It’s become very hard. It’s hard to travel. If you are running a center like this, you’ve got to go to meetings, you’ve got to make contacts. It is time to step down.”
After her husband died, Lonnie gave his wheelchair to Lieberman.
“Who better to have it? I had it at home. It was something I was keeping of Muhammad’s and it was hard to part with, just because he was in that chair so much,” Lonnie said. “But who better to have that chair than Dr. Lieberman? And he deserved it. He deserved that