Coconut oil for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Lyme?

Through a funny series of coincidences tonight while looking for some information about whether Sinemet can be ingested sublingually more quickly than through the gut, I came across a website by a person who has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Apparently he has improved markedly through the daily ingestion of coconut oil. 

I continue to be surprised by just how many times I have bumped into discussions of coconut oil as the solution for any number of maladies including neurodegenerative diseases. About three years ago I interviewed a fellow who was teaching a medical Chi gong class here in Berkeley that I was taking on Saturday mornings. He told the class that he had been severely disabled and had come back more or less from the dead via Chi gong and some other things. Since I tend to leave no stone unturned in my research for my own healing, I made an appointment for a private consultation with him to pick his brain a bit more. Whatever he had, whatever diet or whatever exercises he was doing, I wanted it.

In our meeting he began by telling me his story of being an extremely vigorous outdoorsman for all of his adult life. He used to do stuff like river rafting down rapids on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Then, for unknown reasons, he suddenly crashed and burned. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, and having very little energy whatsoever, he became very depressed and hopeless. Like many of us who have been diagnosed with mysterious diseases for which medical science has very little in the way of solutions, he began digging into the Internet and any literature he could find about treatments for CFS. 

After all of his research, he ended up finding two things that works for him: medical Chi Gong and coconut oil. By the time I met him he seemed like a very vigorous athlete, both optimistic and helpful, and I quite liked his style of teaching medical Chi Gong. As he told me his story, however, I was dubious. I thought this is really just too far out and his healing must be coincidental, not caused by by coconut oil or Chi Gong, merely correlated with it. I mean, coconut oil? The stuff looks like Crisco. It's got to be blocking up his arteries. As for the Chi Gong, that seemed even stranger to me, after having taken only a couple of classes. It just looks like you're standing there and slowly moving your body this way and that, and visualizing energy coming out of nowhere and coursing through your body. 

I've seen a lot of health fads come and go in my 61 years of life. This coconut oil thing is just another fad preying on the hopes and fears of the general public. 

Well, fast forward a couple of years. I'm not totally a convert yet, but I do like coconut oil, I know it has a higher "smoke point" than does olive oil, so I know it's better for cooking at high temperatures. At high temperatures it doesn't turn into trans fats nearly as readily as olive oil does, for example. And, since it doesn't burn as readily, my food tastes better. I figure it can't hurt, so I use it for doing stirfries, frying eggs, etc. And, I'm still doing the medical Chi Gong. I've met a number of people who have benefited from it and so have I. You can read other posts on this blog that describe my friend Bianca, who now claims to be Parkinson's free as a result of intensive (3 hours per day) practice of medical Chi Gong.

I keep seeing more and more articles about the miraculous characteristics of coconut oil, including claims that it is a natural antibiotic and even has some antiviral qualities. (Not dissimilar from garlic in both of these departments.) Since then,I have begun eating coconut oil on a pretty regular basis. I have not been very religious about it, however, but after seeing this video and reading the associated website link which will also include here, I'm going to up my dose to somewhere in the vicinity of 8 tablespoons per day. I will keep you posted on how it goes. 

Apparently, this fellow who has the blog about his Parkinson's disease improvements believes that he owes his improving health to the coconut oil and a change of diet. From what I can gather, he did both pretty much at the same time. It seems he eliminated high glycemic foods, including grains, sugar, and concentrated fruit juice from his diet.

Okay. So much for my preamble. Here is the website:

http://tending-the-iris.us/coconut-oil-benefits-for-parkinsons-disease/

And here is a video about someone improving from Alzheimer's symptoms by using coconut oil:

http://youtu.be/JsBz4oYY6Mk

Please leave comments and tell me what you think. If you have been experimenting with coconut oil, I would like to hear your stories. And also I want to encourage you to subscribe to my blog so you will get new posts in email and you don't have to come back to the website to check for new postings.

-Bob