It Will Never Feel Like Enough, But Participating in Research Helps
Michaeljfox: July 15, 2014
I used to think that the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough in the fight against Parkinson’s disease was just a neurosis of mine. As the daughter of a person with Parkinson’s, I help my dad with his annual golf tournament. I write for The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s FoxFeed blog, and run our family blog telling the stories of people with Parkinson’s. But I’m always plagued by this feeling that I should be somewhere else, doing more.
It’s a feeling I’ve come to realize isn’t just something I struggle with. Many of my Team Fox brothers and sisters (and my actual sister, Emily), are always willing and ready for the next thing we can do to help. When Fox Trial Finder, the Foundation’s online clinical trials matching tool launched, my entire family signed up. My mother has been enrolled in the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiativeclinical study looking for biomarkers for three years. And alerts from Fox Trial Finder would pop up in my email when new trials I was a good fit for were ready for volunteers. But I had a hard time finding something that fit. I would get dissuaded by the length of some trials, since I can’t be sure I’ll be living in this area for 5-7 years. Read More
