I’m honored to welcome Dr. Ray Dorsey, a renowned neurologist, researcher, and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Parkinson’s Plan. Together, we dive into the critical topic of Parkinson’s Disease, now the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world, and explore how environmental toxins (rather than aging or genetics), are fueling its rise. Dr. Dorsey shares his expertise on how exposures, even as early as in utero, can increase the risk of Parkinson’s and other serious conditions, and offers practical steps families can take to protect themselves and future generations.
Throughout our conversation, we discuss the broader themes of environmental health, fertility, and advocacy. We explore the science behind how early-life exposures can plant the seeds for neurodegenerative diseases, the importance of shifting our understanding from genetics to environment, and the actionable ways we can reduce risk. Dr. Dorsey also introduces the “Parkinson’s 25” – a set of practical recommendations for families, and shares inspiring stories of advocacy and change.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why Parkinson’s Disease is rising and the role of environmental toxins
- The impact of early-life and in utero exposures on long-term neurological health
- The difference between genetic and environmental risk factors for Parkinson’s
- How pesticides, air pollution, and chemicals like trichloroethylene affect fertility and brain health
- The “Parkinson’s 25” steps for reducing risk and protecting your family
- Advocacy success stories, including the Healthy Schools Act and organic golf courses
- Practical tips for improving indoor air quality and minimizing everyday exposures
Resources:
Order The Parkinson’s Plan book
The Parkinson’s Plan website: pdplan.org
Contact Dr. Dorsey: [email protected]
Read About The Healthy Schools Act (California)
Get the book “Countdown” by Shanna Swan (on fertility and environmental toxins) or read/watch Dr. Aimee’s interview with Shanna here.
Learn about The National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act
Full Transcript:
Dr. Aimee: Welcome back to The Egg Whisperer Show. Today, we’re taking on an important health topic that may not be on every patient’s radar but should be. Parkinson’s Disease is now the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world. New research shows that environmental toxins, not aging or genetics, are fueling its rise. For that reason, I wanted to include this topic as part of our ongoing look at innovative ways to support fertility patients. The title of today’s show is ‘Trying to Conceive: What Parents Need to Know About Parkinson’s and Environmental Toxins.’
I’m honored to welcome Dr. Ray Dorsey, neurologist, researcher, and author of The New York Times bestseller ‘The Parkinson’s Plan.’ In it, he outlines how exposure, even as early as in utero, can increase the risk of Parkinson’s and other serious conditions. While this might sound like a scary topic, we’ll also be talking about what all of us can do about it. He has a list of what he calls the Parkinson’s 25, which are practical steps families can take to protect themselves and future generations from the disease. Plus, they have an outline of how we can help all advocate for change.
Thank you, Dr. Dorsey, for joining me today. What an honor to have you on.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Thanks very much, Aimee. Everyone calls me Ray.
Dr. Aimee: Okay. Thank you. Same. Whenever anyone says doctor, I’m like, “Please, just say Aimee.” To start, can you explain what Parkinson’s Disease is, and why is it now considered the fastest growing neurological condition worldwide?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Classically, Parkinson’s Disease is a neurological disorder characterized by having two of the following four symptoms; a rest tremor, usually in the hands, usually more on one side than the other, slowness of movement, stiffness, and trouble walking or balancing. Some prominent individuals, including Michael J. Fox, Mohammed Ali, and others have had Parkinson’s Disease.
What’s surprising about Parkinson’s Disease, unlike seizures, strokes, and migraines, is that its first major description didn’t occur until 1817. In 1817, a British surgeon, 61 years old, named James Parkinson saw something new on the streets of London. He said, “I’ve seen a stooped posture, a tremor, and this tendency to walk faster and faster and to fall forward. This disease has not been classified in medical literature.” He described six individuals with the disease that would later be called Parkinson’s Disease, named after him in 1817.
Two hundred years later, the Global Burden of Disease study estimated that six million people had Parkinson’s Disease. How do you go from a disease not being classified in medical literature affecting six people to six million in a span of just 200 years? It can’t just be aging alone. Even after you adjust for aging, the rise has increased 60%. It can’t be genetics, because our genetics don’t change that much in the span of just 200 years.
So, I think it’s the environment. I think it’s chemicals in our food, water, and air that are fueling the rise of this disease, and I think they begin with 1800 London. When Dr. Parkinson described the condition, it was at the height of the Industrial Revolution, London is its capital, and air quality in 1800s London is what cities like New York and Chicago have experienced from the Canadian wildfires, where literally the skies over The Big Apple, where I’m sitting right now, turned orange. That was every day in 1800 London. That’s equivalent to Delhi, India today or Beijing, China today. I think Dr. Parkinson described the effects of high levels of air pollution beginning in the 1800s.
Dr. Aimee: Let’s establish why this is of concern to our audience, which is mostly patients on a fertility journey or other healthcare practitioners in the fertility field. What do those looking to grow a family need to know about Parkinson’s?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: The seeds of Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions are planted early. You don’t get exposed to these chemicals and develop the disease the next day, much like you don’t develop lung cancer after smoking a cigarette the day before. Your exposures when you’re young plant the seeds for diseases that you get when you’re older. I work at the other edge of the spectrum, I care for people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. It has been a little bit of a surprise to me how early these seeds of disease can be planted. I’ll give you a couple of great examples.
One, there’s a woman named Dr. Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas, and she was the Doogie Howser of Mexico. She went to medical school in Mexico City at age 15. Imagine being a woman going to medical school in Mexico City in the 1980s. She was really concerned about the effects of air pollution on the brain health of children. Mexico City, as you might recall, in the early 1990s had the worst air pollution of any place in the world. She did an incredible study, one that’s not likely to be replicated any time in the near term, where she looked at the brains of children and young adults who unfortunately died in car accidents or from gun violence in Mexico City. She looked at their brains, from children as young as 11 months old to young adults as old as 40. She looked at 203 brains. She finds Alzheimer’s pathology. Not the disease, obviously, because they were too young to have the disease and memory difficulties, but she finds Alzheimer’s pathology in 202 of the 203 brains.
202 of 203 brains, including in a child as young as 11 months old, have Alzheimer’s pathology in Mexico City. In about 20% of those brains, they had Parkinson’s pathology. This suggests that the seeds of these diseases, in this case from air pollution, are planted at a very young age, as early as 11 months old.
There are other studies that suggest that early childhood exposure, early exposure perhaps to babies, even perhaps I’ve heard stories around conception can plant the seeds for what we would consider neurodegenerative disorders, what you and I learned about in medical school as adult diseases of seniors, largely. Those roots can begin in childhood. That’s why we wrote The Parkinson’s Plan, that’s why we did TheParkinson’s 25, because these efforts to prevent the onset of these diseases can begin at an early age. You’re never too early or, quite frankly, too old to start worrying about preventing Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s.
Dr. Aimee: You make an incredibly strong case that environmental toxins, not just genetics or aging, are driving the rise in these cases. I think this will be of interest to our audience since we often screen for genetics as part of our fertility journey. Can you explain why that’s such a critical shift in understanding, both for Parkinson’s as a disease and for fertility patients?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Yes. I can definitely speak for Parkinson’s. The role that genetics plays in diseases is highly variable. I used to care for people with Huntington’s Disease, which as you probably recall from medical school is due to a single genetic mutation, it’s autosomal dominant. If you inherit that gene and you live long enough, through genetic mutation, you will develop the disease. If you don’t have that genetic mutation, you will never get Huntington’s Disease. Parkinson’s Disease is at the other end of the spectrum. A great study done by The Parkinson’s Foundation offered free genetic counseling and genetic testing to thousands of Americans with Parkinson’s Disease and individuals around the world. They looked at the results from the first 8,000 individuals who participated in the study, published in ‘Brain’ last year, and of those, 13% carried genetic cause or genetic risk factor. Put another way, 87% of Americans with Parkinson’s Disease do not carry any known genetic cause or genetic risk factor for the disease. The vast majority of Americans with Parkinson’s Disease, the cause lies not within them, but outside of them in their environment.
Dr. Aimee: You write that children’s exposure, and you also shared with us today, can begin as early as in utero. What does science tell us about how these exposures affect the developing babies? As neurologists, are there other diseases that came up as you researched Parkinson’s that can also begin in utero?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: There’s great research done by my colleague Dr. Virginia Rauh, right here at Columbia University in New York City. She was concerned about the effects of pesticides on children. She looked at a pesticide that has previously been used on golf courses, utility poles, over half of apples, according to one report, had remnants of this pesticide on it, and it used to be sprayed inside the homes of families in New York City. She looked at women who had their homes sprayed with this pesticide called chlorpyrifos, and she found this pesticide in the umbilical cord blood of the children born to these mothers. She then followed these children, and continues to follow these children. She found the higher level of this pesticide in the umbilical cord blood of children, the lower their IQ at age 3, the lower their IQ at age 5, the lower their IQ at age 7.
Just last month, she published a study in GM and Neurology in which she looked at an MRI of the children’s brains who are now ages 6 to 14, and she found structural abnormalities on the brain MRIs of the children whose moms were exposed to this pesticide, and she found that they had slowed motor function. Now, obviously, these children are too young to get Parkinson’s Disease, but in the lab, chlorpyrifos leads to loss of the dopamine producing nerve cells that are lost in Parkinson’s Disease.
Dr. Aimee: Wow. That’s very impactful research for so many reasons. Are there some exposures, neurologically speaking, that anyone who is trying to conceive should be concerned about in regards to trying to conceive a healthy baby? I know things that are mentioned in the book are radon, pesticides, like you just said, herbicides, manganese solvents like TCE, and air pollution.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Yes. I talked a little bit about pesticides. If you want to avoid intellectual disabilities, avoiding exposure to pesticides is important. It’s also worth noting that pesticides are sprayed on kids’ schools and playgrounds. I didn’t know that until writing the book, but many schools and playgrounds are sprayed with it. Fortunately, in California, you have the Healthy Schools Act, which limits the use of the most toxic pesticides on kids’ playgrounds and schools and requires that parents be notified in writing in advance of the use of such pesticides. For the rest of the country, pesticides are routinely sprayed on kids’ schools and playgrounds. And we ask why one in 31 children have autism.
I think we need to start looking at these things much more carefully. As you might recall, many pesticides are nerve toxins.
Another chemical that we found in Parkinson’s Disease that you and I probably didn’t learn anything about in medical school is a chemical called trichloroethylene. It’s a really simple molecule. Your listeners know that water is made up of three atoms, H2O. Trichloroethylene is made up of a whopping six, two carbons in black, one hydrogen in white, and three chlorines in blue, hence its name trichloroethylene. It has a cousin called perchloroethylene that has one additional chlorine atom. Both chemicals have been widely used in dry cleaning. Trichloroethylene, according to the EPA, is carcinogenic by all routes of exposure, meaning it causes cancer. It’s been around for over 100 years.
You and your listeners might be familiar with Camp Lejeune, the Marine base in North Carolina, which you might be hearing ads for. It turns out the drinking water in Camp Lejune was contaminated with trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene. So many women had miscarriages on this military base that there was a cemetery off the base that was called Baby Heaven. Some of the babies were born without brains. My colleagues Dr. Caroline Tanner and Dr. Sam Goldman, both at University of California San Francisco, not too far from where you’re sitting right now, studied the Marines who were exposed to it. By definition, Marines are healthy, they’re young, they were average age 20, and they were exposed for only a short period of time, just over two years on average. Yet, 34 years later, they had a 70% increased risk of developing Parkinson’s Disease. They were Marines, summoned when they were teenagers, who were exposed to this chemical, trichloroethylene, which in previous studies has been associated with a 500% increased risk of Parkinson’s, and they were having a 70% increased risk three and a half decades later.
Dr. Aimee: Wow. Is there any evidence that exposures can impact egg health and sperm health?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: I haven’t looked directly at that. In preparation for this, I did a little research. I’ve read Shanna Swan’s book, Count Down, which talks about the decline in male fertility, sperm quality dropping by about 1% per year.
Brain cells and sperm – now, this I don’t know, but brain cells and sperm, I’m not certain about, share one major commonality. Brain cells are huge in terms of mitochondria, so your brain is 2% of your body weight, but 30% of your energy consumption, most of that from nerve cells. Sperm, as you know better than I do, are chock full of mitochondria, which are necessary to have the sperm propel itself. It turns out that all of these chemicals that are linked to Parkinson’s – air pollution, trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, and certain pesticides – damage the mitochondria. There have been studies that suggest reduced fertility, male and female, for individuals exposed to trichloroethylene. Now, I’m not a fertility specialist, but I do get a little bit concerned about the mechanism by which these compounds act and their impact on sperm, which have a lot of mitochondria, and quite frankly, eggs, which as you know better than I do, are the source for mitochondria for newborns and for all humans.
Dr. Aimee: Your book introduces The Parkinson’s 25. What is it, and how can families use it to lower risks for themselves and their children?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: This is the book, it’s called The Parkinson’s Plan. It’s available anywhere you like to purchase books. It’s chock full of stories, many of which I just shared with you, but the end of the book is The Parkinson’s 25 on page 237. It’s very easy to read, so if you’re not a big reader, you can just go to the CliffsNotes and it has pictures. It has 25 recommendations to reduce your risk of ever getting Parkinson’s Disease, or if you’re among the 1.2 million Americans who have the disease, means to reduce your risk.
I’ll give you the first one. To wash your produce, even organic ones. Pesticides have contaminated our food supply. Remnants of pesticide are found in 20% of common foods. Organic produce, dairy products, and meat can reduce exposure, but can still have unsafe residues of pesticides. Wash your produce, at least with water, and consider simple vegetable washes, vinegar, or salt solutions, too.
We give lots of other things, everything from changing your diet to making sure your grocery store is safe, to checking your well if you get your water from a well, which 40,000,000 Americans do, using a water filter, considering an air purifier, making sure you don’t poison yourself, and the list goes on and on. All very accessible, all written in English, and all very inexpensive, if not free to follow.
Dr. Aimee: Excellent. The information you shared about the playgrounds at schools was a little shocking for me. What can a parent do to protect themselves if the school is using the pesticide, other than taking their kid out of school, is there something they can do to advocate for their family?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Yes. Can I read you a story from the book?
Dr. Aimee: I would love that.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: The book is called The Parkinson’s Plan because we actually give you a plan to prevent the disease, learn why it begins, and amplify the voices of those affected and navigate the frontier of new treatments. Number six in Chapter 10 is to create pesticide-free schools. This is a way that we can create a world without Parkinson’s. In 1998, Robina Suwol dropped off her son Nicholas, a kindergartener at Sherman Oaks Elementary School in Los Angeles. As Nicholas was turning to kiss his mother goodbye, he encountered a cloud of weed killer sprayed by a man in a hazmat suit who had been treating the school’s hedges. Nicholas said, “It tastes terrible,” and began to wheeze. He asked his mom if this would ever happen again. His mom promised it wouldn’t. Two years later, spurred by Suwol’s activism, the California legislature passed the Healthy Schools Act. The law requires that all K-12 public schools and licensed childcare centers develop programs that minimize the use of chemicals and focus instead of weeding and removing dead plants and employing traps. The bill bans the use of high-risk pesticides on schools and surrounding parks. Schools that use pesticides must notify parents annually. The Right to Know Law should serve as a model for schools nationally and beyond.
There’s no reason that parents can’t call up their school’s principal and ask them if they’re using pesticides on their kids playgrounds and schools, and ask them to stop. Kids don’t mind weeds. Kids mind nerve toxins.
We should take commonsense approaches to reducing our exposure to these nerve toxins, which are fueling not just the rise of Parkinson’s Disease, but likely the rise of many other neurological disorders and medical conditions more generally. Some of these nerve toxins, as you probably are aware, are found in breastmilk. You can look at the breastmilk of women nursing from around the world, and find residues of pesticides, many of which are fat-soluble, in the breastmilk of nursing women. Do we really want a society where women have to worry about what chemicals are in their breastmilk from the environment that are being passed on to their children?
Dr. Aimee: No. Absolutely not. This is such an important topic. I feel like I should know more about this as well, and now that I do, I’ll certainly be educating my patients about pesticides even more than I already have.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Both of us trained at top medical schools and at medical institutions, and I was ignorant. I didn’t know about this until I had the gift of a sabbatical in 2018, and I read the work of my colleague Dr. Caroline Tanner, who is a Parkinson’s specialist like me, but has a PhD in epidemiology from Berkeley. She quietly and diligently has been telling us for 40 years in a series of landmark studies, beautiful, elegantly conducted studies. She even traveled to China in the 1980s when she was in her thirties. Being a 30-year-old American woman studying Parkinson’s Disease in China in the 1980s must have been crazy. She’s been showing us that environmental chemicals, certain pesticides, trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, and more recently air pollution are likely contributing to the rise of these diseases.
I look at the world from the lens of Parkinson’s Disease. You look at the world from a lens of fertility. But I think these chemicals don’t just affect one disease, they have a broad range of biological effects, and those biological effects are contributing to a wide range of different medical conditions, everything from problems with fertility to Parkinson’s Disease.
Dr. Aimee: I want to talk a little bit about indoor air quality, that’s another area that you emphasize. Can you talk about why that matters so much and what simple things families can do to make their homes safer?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Many of your listeners will know that radon can evaporate from underlying soil and enter people’s homes and cause lung cancer. Many people have had their homes tested for radon, and if they do find radon, there are simple radon remediation systems that basically suck the air from underneath your foundation and vent it above your roof. Other than that, I didn’t know much about indoor air pollution. It turns out that this chemical trichloroethylene and its cousin perchloroethylene can contaminate groundwater five to 15, or more, below the ground, and they can evaporate from underlying groundwater or soil and enter people’s homes, schools, and workplaces.
I have an email from a fantastic woman who lives in Franklin, Indiana where 80 children have developed cancer, including Kari Rhinehart’s 12-year-old daughter who developed a rare form of brain cancer from breathing in this chemical in her community indoor air. It’s also found in people who live above dry cleaners. I’m going to show you a picture. There was one study done that looked at people who lived above dry cleaners in New York City and in Albany, and found that people who lived in those had unsafe levels of the chemicals. If you’ve ever been in New York City, many apartments are above dry cleaners. This study done by the New York Development of Environmental Conservation found that in 24 of 29 apartments above dry cleaners in New York City had unsafe levels of perchloroethylene, the dry cleaning chemical. According to the EPA, that chemical is a likely carcinogen and has been linked to Parkinson’s Disease. So, I get really concerned about people who might live near a contaminated site or even simply living near a dry cleaner that does dry cleaning on-site could be at risk for exposure to the toxic chemical.
Dr. Aimee: Move, basically, is what you’re saying, if you can.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: I think you just have to be aware. I went to medical school in Philadelphia, and we lived above a dry cleaner, so 25 years after the fact, after learning all of this, I called up the dry cleaner. Fortunately, he was just a store front and actually didn’t do dry cleaning on-site. But who is taught this? You and I were trained at top medical institutions, and we had no idea. Right? None.
Dr. Aimee: Never. Zero.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Dry cleaning chemicals probably weren’t even mentioned in medical school, even though this chemical (trichloroethylene) has been around for 100 years. That means, according to the EPA, it has been causing cancer for 100 years. Trichloroethylene has been causing cancer for a century, yet few people, few medical professionals know that. I even had one of my trainees finish cancer training at Dana Farber, and he said he was never told about trichloroethylene, even though it’s a known carcinogen.
Dr. Aimee: The average age of my patients is around 40 to 42. I want them to all live long, healthy lives, and we all dream of seeing our grandkids. Beyond the concerns of remaining healthy while trying to conceive and having children, what do we all need to know about maintaining health well into our later years?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: I think the seeds of these diseases, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, are likely planted early, but it’s never too late to change the course. There was a great study that looked at women who were nurses, 70 years old, in the United States, and were cognitively normal, and they followed them for five to ten years. They found that the women who lived in more polluted parts of the country with higher levels of air pollution had a greater rate of cognitive decline, suggesting that air quality and air pollution still has effects on people’s health as late as 70 years old. So, it’s never too late to stop getting exposed to these chemicals. Even if you grew up on a farm, even if you drank well water, which is often prone to contamination from pesticides, even if you were a Marine serving at Camp Lejune, you may be able to change the course of your health.
The example that I like to use is that of lung cancer. Within minutes of smoking your last cigarette, carbon monoxide levels drop. Within hours, your heart rate normalizes. Within a year, your risk of heart disease decreases. Within ten years of smoking your last cigarette, your risk of lung cancer has halved. I think you can change the course of your health by taking actions, including those in our book and in other books and other credible sources online, to improve your health and change the course of the disease. It’s not a fait accompli that you’ve been exposed to these chemicals when you’re young, usually unknowingly, and therefore you’re going to suffer the health consequences later.
Dr. Aimee: My husband is an avid golfer, he’s probably on the golf course three or four times a week. We live in California. Are there laws about golf courses and the use of pesticides that you know of? I haven’t done research on it, but I’m wondering if we should be calling the golf course.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: On golf, a colleague of mine, Dr. Brittany Krzyzanowski, a really smart young geographer at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, did a landmark study with her colleague Dr. Rodolfo Savica at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and they looked at individuals who were newly diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. It turns out that individuals who lived within one mile of a golf course had a 126% increased risk of developing Parkinson’s Disease compared to people who lived six or more miles away. Living within a mile of a golf course was associated with a more than doubling of the risk of Parkinson’s Disease compared to people who lived far away.
Why is this? Uncertain. But pesticide use on golf courses can be up to 80 times as much as the pesticide used on farmland area per acre sprayed. Dr. Brittany Krzyzanowski spent a lot of time in the paper looking at potential water sources for individuals who lived near there. Pesticides can contaminate underlying groundwater, especially if you get your water from a well. In a rural area, the pesticides could run off and contaminate your drinking water, and you could be drinking it.
I personally get even more concerned about inhaling these pesticides. There was one case report that found about 17 or 18 individuals with Parkinson’s Disease clustered around a golf course, and about 80% of them lived downwind of the golf course. I get worried that pesticides that are sprayed on golf courses don’t just stay there, they can migrate and people can breathe them in.
At the outset of our conversation, I said that Parkinson’s Disease is classically considered a brain disease. But in 2003, a really smart German pathologist named Dr. Heiko Braak said that the pathology of Parkinson’s Disease doesn’t actually begin in the brain, that Parkinson’s Disease isn’t primarily a neurological disorder. When he looked at the pathology, he found the pathology first in the smell center, the olfactory bulb of people, or in the nucleus for the vagus nerve that goes to the gut. As you’ll recall from neuro anatomy, the vagus nerve is in the brain stem and it has projections almost two or three feet long down to the gut.
In 2019, my colleague Dr. Per Borghammer in Denmark said there are two forms of Parkinson’s Disease. He says there is a brain-first form of Parkinson’s Disease that begins with pathology beginning in the smell center, and there is a body-first form of Parkinson’s Disease that begins in the gut. I wrote to him and said this was fantastic. I like to read, so Sunday is my reading day, and I’ve printed out all of his papers, marked them all up, and read them.
I emailed him and said, “How does this fit in with chemicals that we inhale, leading to a nose or brain-first form of the disease, or chemicals that we ingest leading to a gut or body-first form of the disease?” He hadn’t even considered it. Quite frankly, he was on the skeptical side, but I persuaded him, and we wrote a paper called ‘The Body, the Brain, the Environment, and Parkinson’s Disease,’ arguing that for some individuals Parkinson’s Disease begins from inhaling chemicals, like pesticides that are sprayed on golf courses – again, that needs to be demonstrated or proven – and leads to early perhaps loss of smell, early asymmetric Parkinsonism, and some people it begins in the gut and then ascends up the vagus nerve and other nerves, like the synthetic nervous system, gives you a more symmetric form of Parkinsonism with early constipation, for example, early problems with sleep disturbances, and then early more symmetric Parkinsonism.
So, two forms of the disease, one that could be consistent with inhaling chemicals and one that could be consistent with ingesting chemicals, both of which the seeds are planted early.
Dr. Aimee: Okay. I’m going to take away his golf membership. I’m just putting that out there right now.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Or just call up the golf course and say, “Can we spray less pesticides?” There’s an organic golf course that we talk about in the book in Martha’s Vineyard, because Martha’s Vineyard was concerned that pesticides sprayed on the golf course would contaminate their aquifer, which is the source of the drinking water for people in Martha’s Vineyard. They didn’t want to drink pesticides with their water, so they created an organic golf course. If we can create organic foods, why can’t we create organic golf courses? Why can’t Pelican Hill advertise itself as an organic golf course and that be a point of distinction and point of pride not just for the golfers, but for the health of the community?
It turns out it’s not just people who live near golf courses who are at risk. Three studies have found that greenspace workers, which includes landscapers, have a higher risk of Parkinson’s Disease. We have these clues, we have these signals. We talk about a person in the book who grew up next to the 13th hole of a golf course in Charlotte, North Carolina. As a young teenager, he worked on the “sod squad.” At age 17, his parents are telling him to sit up straight and his left leg starts to tremor. He’s diagnosed with Parkinson’s at 23.
We have the clues. We just need to take sensible actions to prevent exposure to these chemicals that are polluting our food, our water, and our air, and often this exposure is involuntary. We’re paying a really high price for this as individuals and as a society, and economically. The economic burden of Parkinson’s Disease is 50 billion dollars per year. If we prevented just 1% of Parkinson’s Disease, the economic benefit would be half a billion dollars, more than the Michael J. Fox Foundation or the NIH spends on Parkinson’s research in any given year.
Dr. Aimee: Wow. I know that you appeared on Oprah Daily, and you mentioned that we as a society have the ability to change the course of Parkinson’s, saying we have a chance to get rid of the disease. When you have a chance, you have to take it.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: Look at the diseases in the past. Diseases come and go. We didn’t have infectious diseases until the Agrarian Revolution and we had cities. Early hunter-gatherers were not dying of influenza, were not dying of cholera, because there was no way for these bacteria and viruses to spread, in all likelihood. We live in a world that is largely free of polio. We live in a world where HIV is decreasing, not increasing. We live in a world where drinking and driving is socially unacceptable. We live in a world free of smallpox. We live in a world where measles, mumps, and rubella are extraordinarily rare. If we figure out what the causes of the disease are – and in our book, we argue for the vast majority of us it’s chemicals in our food, water, and air – we get rid of the diseases.
When you have a chance to get rid of a disease, you have to do it. You can’t just sit around and wait. Right? Every day, 250 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson’s and another 100 die from it. The single best thing we can do as physicians is to improve the health, and the easiest way to improve the health is to prevent people from getting diseases in the first place. We now prevent HIV with a condom. I think you and I may not have HIV because of the activism of people like ACT UP, Larry Kramer in New York City, Peter Staley in New York City, David France in New York City, and then a huge organization in San Francisco changed the course of HIV. That was a generation before us, medically speaking.
It’s now, I think, on our generation to get rid of these chemicals so that we decrease Parkinson’s Disease, we decrease the likelihood of autism, we decrease the likelihood of people getting brain cancer, ALS, and Alzheimer’s Disease, and we increase the likelihood that people are fertile and we increase the likelihood that people can have healthy, full-term, neurologically normal babies. This is what our responsibility is. It’s our duty. We need to execute on this in a timely way so that future generations are spared these terrible conditions.
Dr. Aimee: If someone has Parkinson’s or has a loved one with Parkinson’s, what advice do you have for them in supporting their health after a diagnosis?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: I think when you’re diagnosed with any condition, you need to ask why, “Why did I get this disease?” Whether it’s an ACL tear among girls who are soccer players, why are girls getting ACL tears? Are there ways that I can prevent myself from getting an ACL tear in the future? What a nice thing that would be. If I get cancer, why did I get cancer, and what can I do to reduce my risk of getting it? If I have a low sperm count, how did that happen, how can I prevent that from happening to my sons and my grandsons? I think if you have Parkinson’s Disease, you need to ask why you got the disease.
If a smoker is diagnosed with lung cancer, what’s the first thing the doctor is going to tell them to do? Stop smoking. But if you’re diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, if you’re a farmer in Central Valley, California, and you’re diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, is the doctor telling you to make sure that you’re not exposed to Paraquat, a weed killer that’s associated with a 150% increased risk of Parkinson’s Disease?
I think if we figure out why people have it, we can stop the ongoing exposure. The Parkinson’s 25 can reduce your risk of ever getting the disease and may be able to slow the rate of progression. If you’re diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, about 60% of your nerve cells that produce dopamine have died off. You need to protect that remaining 40%, and you need to be very serious about that. One way to do that is to avoid ongoing exposure.
The second thing you can do if you have Parkinson’s is you need to exercise. We know that exercise releases growth factors in the brain that may protect the remaining nerve cells. Third, Parkinson’s Disease is highly treatable. There’s a medication called Levodopa that you learned about in medical school that is highly effective for individuals with Parkinson’s Disease. Find out why you got diagnosed, avoid exposure to toxins, chemicals in your food, water, and air, exercise, and consider medical treatments.
Dr. Aimee: Right. Thank you for that. Is there anything you’d like to add that you feel would be of interest to the fertility community or doctors like me treating fertility patients?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: I think we just need to be a lot more mindful that the seeds of diseases are planted early. The lag time between exposure, we’ll just do lung cancer and smoking. It’s a 25-year lag between the introduction of cigarettes to the rise of lung cancer. In the early-1900s United States, there was almost no lung cancer. Lung cancer, which is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and around the world, just largely did not exist in 1900. It was so odd that it was considered a once-in-a-lifetime oddity, doctors and medical students would gather around thinking they would never see a case. Smoking was introduced in the United States in the early-1900s, and 25 years after smoking is introduced, you see a corresponding rise in lung cancer. We stopped peak smoking in California, for example, in the 1970s, and 25 years after that, we see a corresponding decline in lung cancer. Today, 80 to 90% of lung cancer is still due to smoking.
The seeds of these diseases, whether it’s Parkinson’s Disease, whether it’s ALS, whether it’s Alzheimer’s Disease, may be planted at a very young age. We need more research on that. It’s very little research that’s being done on this. These chemicals are not just important to a child’s health, they’re not just important to fertility, they’re likely important to adult-onset disorders. If you don’t get these exposures when you’re young, what a gift. You are giving a gift to your children and grandchildren of a life likely free of Parkinson’s Disease, or Alzheimer’s Disease, or certainly substantially reduced. You may not be around for them when they’re 70 or 80 and getting Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, but you’re giving them the gift of a life that can be largely free of these terrible diseases.
Dr. Aimee: Wow. Finally, where can people find your book and learn more about The Parkinson’s Plan? If someone out there wants to see you as their physician, how can they do that?
Dr. Ray Dorsey: The book is available anywhere books are sold. Somewhat surprisingly, the book became a New York Times Bestseller and, actually, the bookstores were sold out. I think by the time this airs, it should be back in stock, so they can buy it wherever they like to buy books, Amazon and other places. If you have a support group or a group, you can order them in bulk at BookPal or Porchlight at deep discount.
If you have questions about Parkinson’s Disease that we didn’t answer here, you can just email us, Michael Okun and I read all of the emails that come into us, it’s [email protected]. Our website is PDplan.org, and that’s where you can learn more about it. Both Michael and I are visiting communities across the country, we’re visiting communities affected by Parkinson’s Disease, we’re visiting communities affected by other brain diseases, and communities affected with contaminated sites. If you’d like us to come visit your community, you can also email us at [email protected].
Dr. Aimee: That’s great. I’m just curious, have you talked to the President? I imagine that this is something that he would want to talk to you about.
Dr. Ray Dorsey: We’ve reached out to members in Congress and members of the administration. There are definitely members of Congress that are deeply interested in it. The foreword to our book is written by Republican Congressman Gus Bilirakis from Florida, whose brother and father have or had Parkinson’s, and Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton, a Democrat from Virginia who was diagnosed with a very bad Parkinsonian disorder called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. We’re trying to make this known. They passed a bill in Congress in 2024 called The National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act, and it passed Congress 407 to 9, and it unanimously passed the Senate, and was signed into law by President Biden in late 2024. It requires the federal government for the first time to come up with a plan to prevent, treat, slow, and cure Parkinson’s Disease. If people make their voices heard, change can happen. Politicians react to what their constituents want. If we want a world free of Parkinson’s Disease, if we want a world free of Alzheimer’s Disease, if we want a world where people can conceive at age 40 and have healthy normal children, we can have that done, but we need to make our voices heard and the politicians will follow.
Dr. Aimee: I love that. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ray, for sharing your groundbreaking work. It’s so eye-opening to learn how deeply environmental toxins can affect not only our own health but also the health of our children and future generations. You’ve taught us so much today.
For listeners, I highly recommend their new book, ‘The Parkinson’s Plan.’ It’s a practical and empowering guide filled with steps you can take today to reduce risk and advocate for healthier communities.
That’s it for today’s episode of The Egg Whisperer Show. If you’ve found this conversation valuable, please share it with a friend. Remember, you have the power to create a safer and healthier future.
