UF physician part of Parkinson’s panel at White House

In this image from an online video, Dr. Michael Okun speaks during panel discussion about Parkinson's disease at the White House on Monday.

The White House

By Christopher Curry
Staff writer

Published: Monday, March 23, 2015 at 11:50 a.m.

Last Modified: Monday, March 23, 2015 at 11:50 a.m.

A UF Health physician and researcher was part of a panel of experts who gathered at the White House Monday morning to discuss progress and challenges in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.

“The mind-blowing changes we can see from research are really amazing,” said Dr. Michael Okun, the co-director and co-founder of the UF Health Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration.

Okun, who is also the medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation, described Parkinson’s as “the most complex disease in medicine. Period.”

But he said its complexity has also led to some treatment techniques that people decades ago may not have imagined possible. He pointed to deep brain stimulation, or “pushing” electricity deep into a patient’s brain to change its circuitry and improve their condition.

Okun and other panel members said the progress to date in research and treatment could slow or stall if research funding from the National Institutes of Health is not increased.

But Panel member Dr. Caroline Tanner, the director of the Parkinson’s Disease Research, Education and Clinical Center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said the funding trend has been moving in the opposite direction, with less money available and grants more difficult to obtain.

During a morning that also included discussions featuring patients and their caregivers, Okun said Parkinson’s is a “disease that affects the family.” He said that while doctors are often the “center of the universe” in medicine, with Parkinson’s, the “patient is the sun” and everything must revolve around him or her.

The panel discussion was part of the White House’s Champions for Change for Parkinson’s Disease event. 

Okun co-founded the UF Health Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration in 2002. The center has treated several thousand patients and tracks nearly all of them in “one of the largest research databases of movement disorders in the world,” according to UF Health

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