There are no rules when it comes to Parkinson’s disease

It’s frustrating when symptoms don’t follow any discernible pattern

Written by Mollie Lombardi | January 6, 2025

I’ve always been pretty organized and logical. I like knowing the rules and the “why” behind things. My brain looks for patterns I can rely on to predict or explain everything. Growing up in a family where my dad taught seventh and eighth grade science, I was always encouraged to look for these kinds of rules.

The physical world has laws that guide it — specific rules for how things act. These laws are always in place and always play out in the same way. For example, one of the rules of physics that guide our universe is Newton’s third law of motion, stating that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I like this law. It makes sense; you can see it play out in the world. And it’s true for everyone and every object.

However, medicine and disease don’t have many logical, provable laws, and Parkinson’s disease doesn’t follow any rules.

I have idiopathic Parkinson’s, the most common form of the disease. Idiopathic is just a fancy word for “we don’t know why.” There are no rules or formulas for who gets Parkinson’s or why. Fortunately, we have discovered the mechanism of the disease — the body stops making enough dopamine — but we have no rules to tell us why it shows up when and where it does or why it shows up in such different ways. We have ideas, and doctors and scientists are looking for answers, but we just don’t know yet.

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