Connected: Rediscovering the Invisible Threads in Parkinson’s and Beyond

There comes a moment, often after many questions, when we begin to sense that Parkinson’s is not simply a condition of the brain.

It is something more layered. More systemic. More… connected.

This is the space that my new book, Connected: Love, Loss, and the Unseen Forces Behind Chronic Disease, invites us into. It’s available now in presale, print here and kindle here, or through your local bookstore. 

Not with easy answers. But with a deeper way of seeing, one built from  the complexity of the body and the subtle relationships that shape our health over time.

John and I had talked about writing a book for a long time. It was always something we would do “someday,” after we had more answers.

I started writing it in December.

What I didn’t expect was how much the process of writing would bring into focus—things I hadn’t fully connected, even after all these years of living it, studying it, and working in it.

First and foremost, this is our love story. It’s a story about John and about the life we built together. About the mission we were on (I’m still on)—to understand Parkinson’s and to make life better, not just for him, but for others walking the same path.  For you.  

But it’s also a scientific inquiry about what’s been missed in our reductionist approach to medicine and science. And frankly, it’s a call out of a system that is very good at naming things and very poor at solving them.  Some parts of the book include uncomfortable truths about where the research stands and why.  

It’s not just a story about Parkinson’s. It’s not just a story about the microbiome. And it’s not just a story about John and me.  It is much bigger.  

It’s the story of how all of those paths came together—and the people, many who are scientists,  who came along with us in that process.

Back in my 2016 TEDx talk, I described what I was seeing as a collapse of the body’s ecosystem.

That idea has held up. Many Ted talks don’t stand the test of time.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph4L_JHeB3I

If anything, it explains more today than it did then.

Because what I’ve come to understand—through John’s experience, through the science, and through the process of writing this book—is that what we call chronic disease doesn’t start where we’re told it starts.  And these involves all chronic disease, not just Parkinson’s.  

It doesn’t begin with a diagnosis. It builds over time, a diagnosis can give it momentum. And it builds across multiple layers that we rarely look at together.

Yes, there is biology. The microbiome. The immune system. Environmental exposures. Food. Chemicals like glyphosate. All of that matters, and it’s part of the story I tell in the book.

But it’s not the whole story.

What became much clearer to me as I wrote—and this is the part that is almost never discussed in a doctor’s office—is that there are deeper forces at play.

Stress that doesn’t resolve.Trauma that gets carried, sometimes for decades.Grief that reshapes the body in ways we don’t measure. And a spiritual dimension that most of modern medicine simply ignores.

No one asked us about that.

No one asked about the cumulative load of life.

No one asked about the moments that shift a person into a prolonged state of pressure or vigilance. And yet, when you start looking closely—across people, across patterns—it’s very hard to ignore that those experiences are key.

They are part of what builds the terrain the biology is operating in.

you

In the book, I touch on moments in John’s life—and in our life together—that take on new meaning when you look at them through that lens. Events that at the time seemed separate. Manageable. Just part of life.

But in hindsight, they weren’t isolated.  They were inputs into the system.  That doesn’t mean they caused Parkinson’s in a simple, linear way. That’s not how this works.

But they were part of the environment the body was responding to.

And when you combine that with everything else—the food system, the chemical exposures, the microbial shifts—you begin to see how a system can gradually lose its ability to regulate and recover.

That’s what I mean by a collapse of the ecosystem.  Not a single failure. A loss of resilience across the whole.

This book is a look back for me with new perspective.

There are things I see now that I didn’t see then. Not because they weren’t there, but because I wasn’t looking at the full picture yet.  Writing helped me to see with fresh eyes.

To connect things I had kept in separate categories—science over here, life over there, emotion somewhere else entirely.

They’re not separate.

They never were.

I’m not offering a cure in this book.  I do offer some suggestions at the end for how to support your resilience that I think can be beneficial when paired with the list of suggestions in The Parkinson’s Plan by Ray Dorsey.  

What I am offering is a more complete way of seeing the problem.

Because when you can see more clearly what’s actually contributing to the breakdown, you also start to see more places where change is possible.  There are so many places we can have an impact that we were never told about.  

That’s where hope comes from.

Not from pretending this is simple—but from understanding there are ACTUALLY things you CAN do that will make a difference.  And that doesn’t have to cost a fortune.  

What I’ve tried to do in Connected is build the bridge between our life experience and the broader framework that helps explain it.

This is a story about love.

It’s a story about loss.

It’s a story about the people who show up when you’re asking the right questions.

And it’s a story about what becomes visible when you’re willing to look at the whole system—even the parts that are uncomfortable, inconvenient, or outside the boundaries of what we’ve been told to consider.

Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And that’s where everything starts to change.