Michael J. Fox is a real inspiration for people with Parkinson's

I was intrigued to watch STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie on Apple TV because I wanted to learn more about his Parkinson’s, which we have been testing my dad for recently. And while his shaky legs and hands and current struggles with that are a really interesting part of the movie, I found his rise to fame from an active and under-sized trouble-maker with bad grades in Canada to three years of struggle in the slums of Beverly Hills before finally landing on his feet as Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties to be equally touching.

Hardly anyone believed in Fox in terms of having the skill to play what would go on to become, I think, his greatest role. But when the show was performed to test audiences, he slayed them and became an obvious star. It wasn’t long before Steven Spielberg called. Fox would work days at Family Ties and go directly to the Back to the Future studio site all night. For three-and-a-half months, he would experience confusion at times as to which set he was on and wonder “how could any of this shit be any good?”

When Back to the Future was at number one at the box office, Teen Wolf was right on its tail at number two. He won best actor for a comedy for Family Ties at the Emmys at the time too. It was like Actor Beatlemania, and he was hanging with all the coolest actors in L.A.

With his Parkinson’s, all his activity and busy-mindedness have possibly made it tougher for Fox to adapt to his new life. His personal trainer in the film says it’s difficult for him to slow down and his mind gets going faster than his body can handle, making Fox prone to falls as he walks. The trainer repeatedly says to slow down. The way his wife (Tracy Pollan, who he met through their roles in Family Ties) and son and daughter interact with him is beautiful, as they laugh at how he hardly responds to texts. They don't treat him differently because of his iconic status or his Parkinson’s.

Fox was in his late 20s when he was diagnosed, and he told himself, “how can I have this old-persons’ disease?” He had to take lots of pills and didn’t eat a lot. He drank alcohol to escape the situation. Siskel and Ebert start to regularly pan his work. 

He admits he was an alcoholic, but has now gone three decades without a drink. After a couple of years of difficulty adapting to abstinence, Fox got back into TV, with Spin City, and his life began to get back on track. Still, he constantly fretted about when he would need the next pill and what would happen if the last one wore off while he was in the middle of acting. 

Fox knew there was no way out of Parkinson’s. He would punch holes in walls. He had to tell people who would tell him to be careful that “there’s no being careful. You get Parkinson’s and you trip over shit and you fall down.” He finally disclosed his disease on national TV to Barbara Walters. “If you look at me long enough, you get used to it,” he says. It’s kind of an “Axl Rose” thing, he adds, recommending that people envision “Paradise City” when they look at him. Kids would say, "will you quit moving around?” And he would say “I’ll give it a shot.”

He decided he wanted to be in the world and not have Parkinson’s force him to hide from the world. He and Muhammad Ali testified on the Hill and continued to raise the importance of the issue and for finding a cure. 

The ending is really touching and shows his family supporting Fox as they all walk down the beach together. He lurches along and it makes you think about how important it is to take care of your loved ones who, as Vampire Weekend sings in the end credits, “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die.” Fox is a stunning example of someone who can inspire all those touched by Parkinson’s.

5 out of 5 stars

Mental Health Suffers When We Surrender to Car Culture

Here's my latest article, originally published in the first issue of the Urban Design and Mental Health Journal.

Maria Hernandez, from Montgomery County, Maryland was always afraid she wouldn’t know how to use public transportation. But since deciding to learn, she rejoices in being “able to relax, read a book, and enjoy the scenery – which you really can’t do when you’re driving.” No doubt Hernandez is onto something that has been very difficult for most throughout the U.S. to muster since the auto industry began seducing us into its lifestyle nearly a century ago.

Of all the many things we surrender when we commit to making most, or all, of our trips by car, the most important may be the most difficult to measure: our mental health. Mental health, our state of well-being in which every individual can realize his or her own potential, allows us to cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively and fruitfully, and make a contribution to our communities. When mental health suffers, the damage can manifest in many ways, from depression to eating disorders to suicide. But our transportation habits – formed long ago but with endless opportunities to change– is one of the greatest tools we have to make sure our mental health remains sharp into old age. We can walk or bike to places and – bingo – that officially counts as regular physical activity. That means these behaviors are associated with improved attention, memory, and cognitive speed across our lifetimes.

What does the research say?

While numerous studies have documented the effect of physical activity on academic performance, extensive research on the connections between transportation and mental health is more difficult to find. Some of the most intriguing evidence includes:

• A Danish study that intended to explore the effects on school children of the food they ate for breakfast and lunch ended up discovering that the way they traveled to school was far more crucial. Those who bicycled or walked performed much better on tests than those who rode in a car or on public transit.

• A British study found that physical exercise and “active leisure” of a person aged thirty six had a significant effect on the levels of memory decline for that same person later on between 43 and 53 years of age. 

• In a study on walking and cognitive function, researchers found that older women who walked the equivalent of an easy pace at least 1.5 hours per week had significantly better knowledge, attention, memory, judgment, reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and comprehension, and less cognitive decline than women who walked less than 40 minutes per week.

• Many studies have found that being a frequent user of transit can affect mental health, from reducing emotional stress by improving people’s access to education and employment to providing an option that many people consider less stressful than driving. “These mental-health benefits are difficult to quantify but potentially large,” said Todd Litman, a researcher for the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

• Italian researchers found that just simply living near transit lines could be good for the mental health of older residents in Turin.

• Other studies have shown that bicycling helps ward off Alzheimer’s, depression, Parkinson’s, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Bicycling has also been proven to make people happier (and, one could assume smarter, since Albert Einstein supposedly came up with his theory of relativity while riding his bicycle).

• Mobility Lab lists several other studies linking active transportation to improved mental health.

Photo credit: Sam Kittner, Mobility Lab

 What should we do about it?

There are many things we can do to become more active in our travels. And one positive sign that we may get help from high up is the recent announcement that the U.S. Department of Transportation will reward $40 million (with Paul Allen’s Vulcan company pitching in an additional $10 million) to the mid-sized city that figures out how best to fix its transportation system. After all, once our crumbling and disconnected infrastructure is improved, cities can get down to the business of making it easier for people to choose the healthier, sustainable, and more productive ways of getting around town. All of this would lead to not just wealthier individuals, but wealthier communities. Cornell University found that, for one, “unwalkable communities cost Americans $190 billion a year in health-care costs.”

It all starts – or should start – at the top. And the federal government has taken at least one positive recent step. As part of its massive new Every Student Succeeds Act, children will not be prohibited from “traveling to and from school on foot or by car, bus, or bike,” as long as the parents have given permission and it’s allowed by local law. It may be sad that we actually have to write that into federal law, but it also may help bring back the good old days when kids were much more active in getting to school.

At the local and regional levels, leaders need to do something completely different than what has been done for decades: prioritize people who walk, bike, and use transit over people in cars, according to Chris Hamilton of Active Transport for Cities. He recently wrote at Mobility Lab, “If we make our streets more people-centered, and if we help make it easy for more people to walk, bike, and take transit, our cities will be more green. More prosperous. More physically healthy. And yes, more mentally healthy.”

Sugar Will Make You Fat, Too Bad There's No Escape

Several actions resulted from my viewing of Katie Couric's 2014 documentary on sugar called Fed Up.

I learned that processed sugar is 10 times more addictive than cocaine and heroin, and that pretty much all Americans are under its spell.

I made a new-year's resolution to cut back on my sugar intake. So far so good. I'm putting fruit on healthy breakfast cereal instead of eating Fruity Pebbles several times a week. I'm rationing the candy stash in my office desk and no longer candy binging to stay away in the late afternoon.

Fed Up is really effective. If you didn't already know sugar is dangerously bad for you, it makes its case persuasively. Reviewing the promotional activities of Coke and breakfast cereals, Couric shows us how we are programmed to crave sugar from the earliest ages. Then the sugar works to tell our brains that we are still hungry and need to eat more junk food to satisfy that craving.

She attributes sugar as the cause of obesity, and the science and anecdotal personal stories present a compelling case that exercise and better diets won't get us out of the fat farm. It's sugar that we have to somehow avoid.

Fed Up has been called the "Inconvenient Truth of the health movement." Of course, Congress has done little about climate change since that film was released. It's pretty sad to think they will do the same about the obesity crisis.

If they do, I might even splurge and drink 10 teaspoons of sugar, the amount that is in one 12-ounce can of Coke.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

In a Past Year of Powerful Films, Dallas Buyers Club Stands Strong

Matthew McConaughey may have seemed a bit of an egotistical jerk lately, but if Dallas Buyers Club is an indication, his acting is high art, and he deserves to be a show-off showman.

I would argue that Chiwetel Ejiofor of 12 Years a Slave was royally ripped off for losing the best actor Oscar to McConaughey, but that really shouldn’t take anything away from his performance as Ron Woodroof, a real-life AIDS victim in the 1980s who started a club in Texas for patients seeking an effective drug smuggled in from Mexico that the FDA refused to approve.

The actor’s performance is so powerful because of the transformation he makes from a rodeo-riding, racist drug and sex addict to a compassionate and successful businessman. He lives much longer than he is supposed to, and in that extra time, he forms a deep bond with best supporting actor Jared Leto’s Rayon, a weird transgender woman with advanced AIDS and just enough secret money to help make the Dallas Buyers Club the place to go for sick patients shunned by the mainstream medical establishment.

The story is fascinating, and it’s unbelievable that the script wallowed in Hollywood for years. At one point, Woody Harrelson was going to play the lead role. But once it was green lighted, the actors were all in, with Leto and McConaughey again going beyond the call. McConaughey stayed in his Texas mansion for six months to get pale and weak. Leto stopped eating at points along his way to losing 30 pounds.

I really love this movie. You could say it’s one of the many arguments for universal health care, and that it’s yet another emotional plea from Hollywood for the medical establishment in the U.S. to get its act together.

***** out of ***** stars