It was on May 9, 2024 when Gisela wrote an email to Dr. Albert Wright after having read an article from him on broccoli seed tea and its effect on Parkinson’s. This was the beginning of an intense exchange of experience and knowledge about the disease that was diagnosed by Gisela’s DaTscan in 2018. When asked by the members of Resolve Parkinson’s to join the team, she was proud to became part of the initiative with the target to find a new successful approach in scientific research to stop Parkinson’s by focusing on patients’ needs and feedback that is usually not in the focus of the pharmaceutical industries’ searches.
Pharmaceutical companies usually have different targets when they invest a lot of money into Parkinson’s disease treatment research. As a physician, Gisela is well aware of this because she used to work for different pharmaceutical companies in different disease areas, performing clinical studies in drug research. When she started her career in 1984, she was enthusiastic about her work because she was convinced that we needed better drugs to combat diseases. Gisela was an engineer assistant before she studied medicine at the universities in Erlangen and Munich and finished with a Ph.D. when she was 31 years old and mother of a daughter.
After 10 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, Gisela came to the point where she reflected on her work and decided to change her focus to prevention rather than wait until a chronic disease reduces quality of life. Because of bad eating habits, people ingest too few vitamins, minerals, trace elements and secondary plant compounds, which led her to develop a food supplement and to write books about healthy living. At that time, she monitored a clinical trial for Coenzyme Q10 in Parkinson’s at university centers all over Germany, not knowing that 12 years later she would be diagnosed with the disease herself.
Since her diagnosis, she has been searching the internet for new medicines and alternative compounds, even when they are not scientifically proven. She tries many of them, being aware that some of them might not help, and that the placebo effect plays an important role as well. Now 72, Gisela does not want to wait until some breakthrough compound is introduced into the market, which she believes will not be the case in the near future if nothing changes in the approach of scientific research in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
