Parkinson's Disease Forced His Retirement, but Former Federal Writer/Editor Fights Back with New Website

(Elkridge, MD) August 27, 2011 -- When Bill Schmalfeldt applied for early disability retirement earlier this year, he had no intention of allowing Parkinson's disease a moment to enjoy its victory.

"Parkinson's won the battle," the 56-year old Maryland man said. "We're going to win the war."

Schmalfeldt intends to keep up the fight against this crippling neurological disorder by raising funds for the National Parkinson Foundation through his writing and products he has designed. Schmalfeldt says he chose the NPF as the recipient of his donations for two basic reasons -- he was diagnosed in 2000 (at age 45) at a clinic run by the NPF in Miami. Also, he said, the NPF isn't a celebrity cult.

"The people who donate to NPF are doing so because they want to find a cure or new and better treatments, not because they feel sorry for a celebrity," Schmalfeldt said.

The website, located at http://billschmalfeldt.com, sells books Schmalfeldt has written and self-published through CreateSpace.com. These books are also available on Amazon.com and on Amazon's Kindle. 100 percent of the profits from selected books are donated to the NPF.

Schmalfeldt's site also sells products he has designed in his "Brain Flakes" store on Zazzle.com. Products purchased from the "I Survived the East Coast Earthquake" folder and the "Parkinson's" folder result in the NPF receiving 100 percent of the profits. Everything else in Schmalfeldt's Zazzle store reaps a 50% profit donation to the NPF.

The website is not Schmalfeldt's first foray into the arena against his foe of nearly 12 years. In 2007, while working as a writer-editor at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., Schmalfeldt volunteered for experimental brain surgery. He wrote about the experience in his book, "Put On Your Parky Face," which is available on his website.

"My job at the time required me to write and produce audio reports about the importance of clinical trials in the search for new and better treatments for disease," Schmalfeldt said. "At length, I became to feel like something of a hypocrite. Here, I had this perfectly good disease and I wasn't doing anything to help find a cure. So I began searching out clinical trials for which I would qualify."

He found one. It was a phase one clinical trial looking at the safety and tolerability of deep brain stimulation in the earlier stages of Parkinson's disease. The neurology department at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville needed 30 volunteers -- 15 would have the surgery which is currently only FDA-approved for the later stages of the disease while the other 15 would stay on their current medication regimes to be used as a comparison to those who had the surgery.

"I am one of 15 people in the United States who had Deep Brain Stimulation surgery in early PD," Schmalfeldt said.

Did it help? He says the jury is still out.

"My symptoms that otherwise would be controlled by the standard treatment with a levodopa/carbidopa combination seem to be pretty well controlled. Those things that the medications can't help are going to hell in a handbasket," he said.

Chief among his current complaints is a lack of balance that causes him to fall very easily. That was the main reason he put in for early disability retirement, he said.

"I don't see it as giving up," Schmalfeldt said. "Instead, it gives me more time to write, to raise awareness, to try to get folks to care about the 1.5 million Americans who have Parkinson's and the 50-thousand who will get the diagnosis this year."

It helps him, he said, to put a human face on his opponent. "Parkinson's thinks it beat me by forcing my retirement. Au contraire. Now I'm free to fight 24/7," he said.

Just a former federal writer/editor, trying to fight back against Parkinson's disease.

Bill Schmalfeldt
6636 Washington Blvd. #71, Elkridge, MD 21075

This release was published on openPR.