Riding bicycles, unlike walking, involves the handle bars and the breaks, while walking with poles and sticks seems to increase the benefit of that exercise. Indeed, those practices which we now know can delay the progression and aid symptom reduction in people with PD all appear to involve the hands intimately. This is especially true when using the hands for tasks which require use of other senses, such as hand-eye-co-ordination or clapping along to music, which bring into play other parts of the brain. Indeed, in his book on Dystonia, Dr Joaquin Farias emphasises the importance of touching the affected muscles.Ĭonversely, the use of our hands for complex tasks is "stress interrupting", so using our hands in specific ways can be calming on the Nervous System. Self-touch lets our Nervous System know we have heeded the internal alarm and have paid attention. In particular, it may become more difficult to touch/compress/hold pain points of the body, thus amplifying these pains and problems, since touching pain points is a natural pain relieving mechanism and down regulate excited states of the Nervous System. This lack of ability to use the hands can have knock-on negative effects for the senses and muscles in other parts of the body too, since it also inhibits self-touch. Indeed, the diminishing of the range of movement of the hands is one of the very first signs of PD: one the earliest symptoms which become obvious in people developing PD manifests as handwriting getting smaller and smaller. ![]() Under chronic stress the use and senses of our hands become inhibited, as the body draws its energies inwards to protect vital organs: while we can survive the loss of a limb or two to a lion, we can't survive having our guts ripped open, so our fingers are de-prioritized from the brain and body's resources. When unnaturally stressed too frequently or for extended time, due to the pressures of modern life for example, this loss of dexterity and proprioception (sense of relative position and effort needed to move) in our hands, and loss of senses of touch, can become permanent. The nerve fibre connections responsible become harder to fire up as the networks of motor and sensing neurons continue to atrophy. ![]() ![]() One of the major contributing factors in this degeneration is the states of stress people with PD are locked into, fight-or-flight and especially freeze (playing dead). If no interventions are put in place to remedy the situation, the hands of people with PD become stiffer, with fingers more curled up and eventually the ability to pick things up, grasp or push and pull is lost.
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