Empowering
Your PD Journey

Welcome to emPowereD, a website created by Neurologists, a Neurosurgeon and Physiotherapist specialising in the management of Parkinson’s disease. Together we have been involved in the education of people living with Parkinson’s disease and health professionals over many years. In our many discussions, a number of common themes have evolved and we wanted to create a resource that would help to address these.

​A key difficulty, reported by many of our clients is finding information which caters specifically to their symptoms rather than PD symptoms in general.

This frustration is amplified as their symptoms change over time, making it hard to know what to expect and what might help. Here, natural history studies which have followed groups of individuals living with PD for over 20 years. These studies provided significant insight in regards to the sequence in which symptoms might evolve over time. 

As clinicians, this literature is fundamental in guiding our understanding of when to employ different interventions. 

We believe that this information is useful to our clients and their carers too, deepening understanding and opening new possibilities for empowerment, self-management and quality of life.

Accordingly, we’ve taken a different approach to most PD information resources and deliberately split the website up based on duration of Parkinson’s disease from diagnosis, so as to provide information in a way that is more specific to both the symptoms and the interventions that can be of greatest benefit as PD symptoms change over time.

Whilst you are welcome to read everything, the site is designed to allow you to seek out information relevant to you, rather than wading through information that is not currently relevant. This website is a work in progress, and we plan to provide updates as new treatments and innovations in the PD space become available. 

As clinicians we are buoyed by both the symptomatic therapies and by the stunning progress in understanding causative factors for PD. These highlight the emerging possibility of neuroprotective therapies that may slow or indeed stop the progression of PD.

We know that there is a large variability in how our patients manage their PD. One consistent finding however, is that those people who invest in and practice lifestyle interventions seem to fair better. This is backed by science, most particularly with respect to exercise and activities but also interestingly, with respect to coping styles. This means as someone living with, or caring for someone living with PD, there is a lot that you can do to improve things for yourself or your loved one. In each section, we will discuss the self management tools that may be particularly helpful at that stage of your PD journey.

We hope you find this helpful… and more than a little bit empowering!