Parkinson's disease is an important medical problem today. In Western countries, this slowly progressing chronic neurological disease affects about one in every five hundred pensioners. The disease is characterized by the destruction of neurons, which leads to muscle inelasticity, inability to normal motor activity, tremors, body instability and a host of other unpleasant symptoms.
You cannot lead a normal life with such a disease. The situation is aggravated by the fact that it is impossible to diagnose Parkinson's disease in advance. It is only when a person begins to experience difficulties that doctors can determine that his central nervous system has begun to decline. However, this ailment cannot be cured - it is only possible to weaken the symptoms. Now, if it was possible to somehow diagnose the approach of the disease in a few years, then the world's doctors, probably, would have come up with something.
Staff at the University of Edinburgh made a startling statement: early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease may still be possible. However, so far only one person is known who is able to carry it out. And this is not a doctor or a scientist, but an ordinary Australian pensioner. Joy Milne, 65, who lives in Perth, claims to have an extraordinary gift. She is able to determine by smell that a person will have Parkinson's disease in the foreseeable future.
The first person Milne diagnosed this way was her own husband, Les. Six years before the man was diagnosed with this terrible disease, Joy noticed that her husband began to smell something unusual. A delicate smell of musk, goat's milk and something else very familiar began to emanate from him. Over time, this smell became stronger and stronger. In response to his wife's words, Les said that it all seemed to her. The man died in hospital last year.
Error-free diagnosis of patients
At first, the Australian woman did not associate this smell with her husband's ailment, but then several times she met other people suffering from Parkinson's disease, and suddenly noticed that they still emanate the same strange "scent." It was then that Milne realized that she was endowed with an amazing ability to identify this disease through her sense of smell.
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Edinburgh researchers were very impressed with the woman's capabilities. Joy has gone through many tests. For example, once twenty-four people were seated in front of her, half of whom had Parkinson's disease. The Australian woman, having sniffed them, identified all the patients and, it would seem, overdid it, saying that in fact there were not twelve, but thirteen. The amazed experts did not even focus on the fact that Milne attributed a person from the "healthy" group to the patients.
However, eight months later, the experiment took an unexpected turn when the same man, taken from the street in order to "dilute" sick participants, was diagnosed by doctors with Parkinson's disease. Thus, the pensioner accurately identified all test subjects with this disease.