Customer Reviews

The Case of the Frozen Addicts

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I bought this book I didn't know what to expect - I thought it would be similar in style to Oliver Sacks' "Awakenings" (i.e. a series of case histories). While I enjoyed Awakenings I would have to say that this book is much better - it truly reads like an un-put-downable thriller. The plot has all the ingredients for a great story - whatever we might think of heroin addiction and the criminal backgrounds of many of the frozen addicts, we can only feel sympathy for their terrible fate; Langston is a perspicacious but poorly funded neurologist who must fight the prejudices of the medical establishment (and ultimately the government and President) in order to develop an exciting but controversial new treatment that will give the addicts the only hope of release from their living hell. It's great stuff, made all the better of course because its based on truth. The book is also hugely informative and gives a sobering insight into the suffering endured by victims of Parkinsons and other neurodegenerative diseases; as well as offering hope in the form of future treatments. It is also superbly written. What more can I say?

A relation between a disease know for its unknown causes and a new "designer" drug made to bypass the actual laws, drug that actually caused the addicts to get the Parkinson's disease, then the overwhelmed reaction to the medical research community that could make a disaster by spreading the disease amongst researchers unaware of precautions to take manipulating the chemicals that caused the six drug addicts to be sick. This book is great from the begining to the end, as entertaining as the best fiction book even though it is a very factual book. I do not have a strong medical background, but I clearly understood this book and enjoyed reading it.

A must for all Parkinson's Disease interested persons. A spellbinding tale depicting the beginning of modern science research into the causes of PD brought about by a very unlikely source. Hard to set aside once started. E. Jack Savely

We are passing the book around the family now. The farther has PD. It has been great for us to gain an understanding of this mysterious illness.

I loved reading and re-reading this book. Simple language and it's a thriller for sure. I love how great it is and how in depth it becomes - describing the medical and scientific parts in a clearly understandable way. The chemistry in this book made me fall in love with my organic chemistry class before I even took it.

I read the book but it was borrowed via an inter-library loan. I ordered the book a week ago because I went to a talk by the author. Very interesting stuff. This discovery totally revolutionized how Parkinson's disease is being studied. Without the findings documented in this book, there would never have been animal models for drug development and the deep brain stimulation surgery. It is a book that worth reading, many times over.

I have not read the entire book yet -- but the condition was exactly as listed on Amazon when I received it via mail.

So these six junkies show up on Monday, back in the early Eighties, with full blown Parkinson's, and they had all been in good shape on Friday -- well, for a junkie, anyway. Heroin addicts. They got some bad dope, which contained MPTP (methyl phenyl tetrapyridine). Maybe MPTP will turn out to be useful in curing or preventing Parkinson's someday; we havent' cured it yet, unfortunately. Meantime, Langston here has made quite a career out of the junkies. Let me note for you all that Langston manages to get through his whole yarn without using the word mitochondria or mitochondrion, at least in the edition I bought and searched as best I could. I don't want to spend a lot of time explaining that, but just so you know.