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People with Parkinson's are not some weird people on the edge of human experience.

Parkinson's is a slow but inevitable process. It's hard living with it on a daily basis. The difficulty facing people with it is that they never quite know 'Can I or can't I do this today?'

I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.

In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.

The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.

I traveled with the band for five years with Parkinson's.

When I was in desperate trouble for maybe eight or nine years, I went to a neuropsychiatrist.

As a practicing neurologist, I can tell you first hand that working with Parkinson's patients offers clinical challenges. But from an emotional perspective, this disease can border on overwhelming.

We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson's disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific.

Parkinson's is very hard to diagnose. So when I finally went to a neurologist, and he said, 'Oh, you have Parkinson's disease,' I was completely shocked.