What if?

When I worked as a management consultant, one technique I used when looking for creative solutions to a client's difficult problems involved magical transformation. We would imagine taking the problem and, with a wave of Merlin's wand, make it much bigger, much smaller, turn it upside down, or remove it altogether.

I thought I would try applying this to PD.

What if 499 out of 500 people had Parkinson’s Instead of one?

 What would we do?

Would all the scientists in the world work together

using funding provided by every nation on earth,

leaving no stone unturned to find a cure in months?

Or perhaps, considering Parkinson’s as normal ageing, we would isolate the freaks with unfettered brains and forbid them to breed for fear of infecting the gene pool

 What if just one person in the whole world had Parkinson’s?

 What would we do?

Would the very best scientist in the world dedicate their whole life

and a billionaire’s resources to studying this rarest of all conditions

in a tireless search for a cure?

Or might we value neurodiversity as a difference not a disease

and world leaders would consult with the special one

treating them with the highest respect and reverence for their superior brain?

What if everybody on earth was born with a form of Parkinson's

which got progressively better over time?

What would we do?

Would science concentrate its efforts on reducing the symptoms

to make it easier to live with PD while trying to speed up the progression?

Or would the population start to fall as parents chose not to take on the role of

caring for a stage four parky baby?

What If we woke up tomorrow and nobody on earth had Parkinson's?

Then there would be no need for this poem