Last night Michael J. Fox was honored by WebMD in New York City with its first inaugural Health Heroes Hall of Fame award for his efforts in Parkinson’s disease research and advocacy. The WebMD Health Heroes Award recognizes inspiring individuals who have helped change the health care landscape by meeting a health challenge and giving back to others. Additional honorees were Carson Daly, Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, Dr. Frank Papay, Zarin Ibnat Rahman and Martha Stewart.
Michael sat down with Robin Roberts, who hosted last night’s event, to discuss the honor and how he lives his life with Parkinson’s.
Accepting the award on Michael’s behalf, Claire Meunier, VP of research engagement, reiterated Michael’s sentiments on receiving this honor and that he shares the recognition with his fellow patients and all the researchers who are helping cure Parkinson’s disease in our lifetime.
Michael J. Fox's Crusade for a
Parkinson's Cure
How the actor's Parkinson's diagnosis
changed his life -- for the better, he says.
Michael J. Fox has always
been a poster boy. With his youthful good looks and intelligent charm, he rose
to fame playing a sassy Republican teenage son of ex-hippie parents in the TV
sitcom Family Ties. In the blockbuster Back to the Future film
trilogy, he was a time traveler with perfect comedic timing. And in a later
sitcom, Spin City, he made us wish all politicians were as personable as
his Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty.
In 1998, Fox became a
poster boy for another reason: He went public with the news he had Parkinson's disease, diagnosed 7 years
earlier when he was 30. Parkinson's is marked by:
Trembling in the hands, arms, legs, jaw, and face
Stiffness of the body
Slow movements
Impaired balance and coordination.
The disease had become
unmanageable for the actor, who until then was able to minimize his symptoms
thanks to medication, surgery, and good timing. Eventually, the effort became
too much.
"I needed every bit
of those 7 years to say, 'I want to be out there,'" Fox says. "But at
a certain point I woke up and said, 'What's the risk? That people will judge
you? People are already judging you about whether you wear red shoes or blue
shoes. So I talk funny or shake -- why should I restrict myself?'"
"You have to take
your time and do what you need to do," he says. "But when you arrive
at a place where you are no longer judging it, where there's no good or bad or
right or wrong and it just is what it is, you accept it."
Much to his amazement, so
did everyone else. While Fox feared becoming a sob story for the tabloids, he
was met with huge support. Overnight, the actor beloved for his ability to make
people laugh came to represent the face of an incurable illness that gets worse
over time.
Laying the Foundation
Parkinson's disease
develops due to the death of brain cells that make dopamine, a chemical crucial
to balance, speech, and even memory. There's no cure, and the treatment --
generally a prescription for synthetic dopamine -- is far from perfect.
Regardless, the diagnosis
turned out to be nothing short of a gift, Fox says. "Only when my body
couldn't keep still was I able to find stillness in myself," he explains.
"I think the key to it is the 12-step acceptance rule: 'My happiness grows
in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my
expectations.'"
Fox, now 53, turned the
illness and his struggle with it into a gift for millions of others when he
launched The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's
Research in 2000. Its mission is to fund and support research in the
hope of discovering a cause, new treatments, and, ultimately, a cure. His
celebrity has also helped raise awareness of Parkinson's, including a memorable
appearance before Congress in 1999 when he spoke without using medication so
people could see the ravages of the disease.
With a goal to move
intelligently and quickly, Fox's foundation offers grants -- $450 million to
date -- to researchers with remarkable speed. Angus Nairn, PhD, lead researcher
for Yale's Michael Stern Parkinson's Research Foundation, says: "The NIH
has cut back on research, but Parkinson's has been really fortunate, because
The Michael J. Fox Foundation has been incredibly successful in doing things
other people can't do on their scale. They have a different way of working,
with a very fast turnaround funding research."
The foundation's approach
comes from the founder himself. "Michael is the founder, but he is a
patient first, and as a patient, he has a patient's sense of urgency,"
says Deborah W. Brooks, the foundation's co-founder and executive vice
chairman.
Career View
Fox has always moved at
lightning-fast speed. Raised along with three sisters and a brother by his
mother and his father (a sergeant in the Canadian army), Fox discovered acting
in high school. At 16, he won the lead in a Canadian series called Leo and
Me. Enough work followed to give him the courage to quit high school his
senior year and move to Los Angeles to seek acting work.
For several years, it
looked like a bad decision, as he subsisted on fast food and residual checks
from occasional parts. Then, in 1982, he won the role of Alex P. Keaton in Family
Ties. By 1988, when he married actor Tracy Pollan (who he met on the set of
Family Ties and who he calls "my bride, the one and only love of my
life"), Fox was working nonstop in movies and television. He was making
the Back to the Future trilogy, Teen Wolf, and Casualties of
War while taping Family Ties.
Exhausted from his
schedule and drinking heavily, Fox was on location in Florida filming Doc
Hollywood in 1990 when his pinky began to twitch uncontrollably. A doctor
linked it to an old injury Fox got while filming a stunt on Back to the
Future. A year later, Pollan noticed that one side of her husband's body
seemed rigid during a jog and insisted he see a neurologist. This time, there
was no question: Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in September 1991.
The diagnosis made him
among the approximately 10% of patients who have early onset Parkinson's -- the
average age of those diagnosed is 60. As is the case with most people with
Parkinson's, "by the time I had my first symptom, a twitching pinky, 80%
of my dopamine-producing cells were already dead," Fox says. His doctors
told him there was no cure. They could treat him with synthetic dopamine to
replace the chemical deficiency caused by the disease, and he could expect to
work for another decade. Fox pushed it as hard as he could, and a decade later,
he took on the biggest role of his life: leading The Michael J. Fox Foundation.
"The first thing I
wanted to do was put the pieces in place to move forward quickly and not keep
good ideas on the shelf for too long," Fox explains of his mission.
"As soon as ideas appeared, I wanted to give them the wings to fly."
While Fox has had a steep
learning curve, he says he's had no problem being taken seriously by the
research community. "They were like, 'Wow, grants? What line do we form
in?' I think that the Parkinson's community is really excited to get the
attention and have people interested in getting them to work."
Family Ties
The foundation is by no
means the entirety of Fox's world. Most important to him, by his own account,
is his family: He and Pollan have four children -- 19-year-old twins Aquinnah
and Schuyler, who are in college; Esme, 13, a seventh-grader in New York City,
where the couple live; and a son, Sam, 25, who lives nearby in Brooklyn.
"My family is the
exception to the rule that 'what other people think of me is none of my
business,'" Fox says. "I want them to be encouraged and emboldened by
what I do and to see me as a refuge and resource." And yes, life in a
large family can be chaotic, but the actor says it is within that tumult that
he has learned to find a calm mind, much as he's found peace with the tremors
of his disease. "Having a family means you don't always find moments of
quiet, so you find quiet in the chaos.
Fox also continues to
act. "I can play anybody as long as they have Parkinson's," he says
with a laugh. In 2013, he starred in NBC's The Michael J. Fox Show, a
comedy about a man with Parkinson's. "But it was more than I bargained for
work-wise," he admits. The show ran for 19 episodes. Now, he enjoys roles
like his guest-starring part on CBS's The Good Wife, playing an attorney
with, yes, Parkinson's. And he's written two best-selling memoirs, Lucky Man
and Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist.
"I've accomplished a
lot already career-wise, so everything else is just gravy," Fox says.
"What I really want is for our foundation to be so successful it goes out
of business."
Pursuit of Happiness
Fox shares some of his
hard-won wisdom about what it takes to be your best.
Accept what you can't
change. "I think the key to my optimism was accepting my situation [as a
person with Parkinson's]. When I saw it as just one of the things I was dealing
with, then I could see the room around it."
Practice patience. When
Fox does have a down moment, "I just wait it out."
Embrace family ties.
"My family makes me a better person because they take me out of
myself."
Let go of judgment.
"When there's no 'good' or 'bad,' 'right' or 'wrong,' it just is what it
is."
Go for it. "Being
small growing up, I had to make an extra effort in things I did, and it opened
up so many possibilities for me. 'Nothing ventured, nothing gained' was obvious
to me from an early age."
Say yes. From actor to
author and head of a foundation, Fox is open-minded: "Being yourself and
taking risks -- what's the downside?"
Live well. Fox doesn't
drink, watches what he eats, and exercises. "I can't run marathons
anymore, but I hike and have a dog who walks me."
http://www.webmd.com/parkinsons-disease/features/michael-j-fox-
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