This recently published reference guide, known shorthand as The PD Companion, is a lifestyle manual for living with Parkinson's disease (PD). It is filled with salient insights helpful for anyone with PD, their care partners, and families, and it comes packed with love. The book is not overly long, yet it overflows with important information. The clinical details within have been reviewed by the well-respected Parkinson’s researcher Dr. Alberto Espay of the Gardner Center for Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders at the University of Cincinnati.

This is not a guide designed to simply list the enumerable written facts about PD. Rather, it is filled with layperson-friendly creative drawings, tables, and schematics designed to improve readers’ health literacy by contextually illustrating the many key-points about the disorder, highlighting how to take care of oneself medically. It provides essential focus on motor and non-motor symptoms and much more. The manner of information presentation creates reading as easy as it can get when describing a disorder like PD, a disease where no 2 people’s experience of it are exactly alike. With the depth of illustrations and description provided throughout comes clarity and respective priorities for the person living with PD, their care partner(s) and family members to absorb and refer back to as the need arises.

The PD Companion does not end there. It contains key sections devoted to living well with PD for the person with the disorder, care partner(s), family, friends, and colleagues. Much of it is practical advice portrayed logically, including crucial recommendations. Most importantly, all the innumerable “pearls” to be discovered within are presented with care, compassion, and concern. Several unique “bonus” sections in PD Companion serve to round out its long-term utility, such as an appended quick reference guide to the many PD-related abbreviations and acronyms, an ever-growing list which can be challenging to keep track of. Equally important is the exhaustive collection of PD terms and vocabulary with corresponding easy-to-grasp definitions. This glossary of “all things Parkinson’s”, also includes respective page numbers so readers can actually locate the word or phrase in context within the book. Readers will want to keep this reference handy as a consultative resource, and perhaps even provide a “share copy” for interested relations in their life.

There are many excellent books that describe Parkinson’s and discuss how to treat it, and those books do offer advice about living and managing one's life with the disease. Unfortunately, those of us with PD will have the disorder for the rest of our lives; therefore, being filled with hope, positivity, persistence, and education seems to be the best way to make it through this journey. Life with Parkinson's 50 Facts & More is filled with wisdom relevant to your PD life, wherever you are on that journey. This publication is vital reading to help those of us with PD, our caregivers, and our families better understand and manage Parkinson’s unique life challenges and related complexities.

The very first time you finish Life With Parkinson’s 50 Facts & More you will notice that every emotion you possess has been touched, and at the same time you have gained a great deal of knowledge about Parkinson’s disease.

February 10th., 2022 Frank C. Church, PhD. Chapel Hill, North Carolina