Welcome to Martha's Quest. It's a blog about my personal journey to help my husband, John live the best life possible with Parkinson's disease (PD) and how I have transformed my world as mother, wife and professional to become a citizen scientist in search of answers. I'm on a quest to help propel science forward, and ultimately find a cure for PD. I love having the opportunity to share my discoveries, passions, and thoughts with my loyal readers.
I'm Martha Carlin, in 2002 my 44-year-old husband, John, was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. We were told Parkinson's is a disease with no cure, and a guarantee of decline over time. The resources provided were limited, John was sent home with a pill to mask the symptoms and our lives changed forever. Still we were not willing to accept defeat or the status quo approach to the disease.
My business career was as a systems thinker and turnaround expert, so I began to apply those turnaround skills to the puzzle of Parkinson’s disease. I immediately began my quest to find a cure. In the meantime, I worked to find ways to help John better manage and improve other aspects of his health to improve his Parkinson’s prognosis. I looked at food choices, nutrition, chemical exposures through the diet, and more. We changed our diet over the years as more research began to support the importance of diet and nutrition in all chronic diseases. Over the years the research began to build and connect until in 2014 the first research was published pointing to the gut.
This was my Eureka moment! From my business lens, I could see the gut as the general ledger for our health, the record of what is flowing through the system.
I quit my job and we started funding research at the University of Chicago with Dr. Jack Gilbert. Through that research I learned how many chronic diseases are connected to gut bacteria. I founded The BioCollective to help bring together people and research to get the data needed to connect the dots across diseases through the bacteria and their metabolic functions in the gut. Since founding the company and becoming a recognized opinion leader in Parkinson’s, many people contact me to find out how they can improve their prognosis. I field calls and emails but ultimately decided it was time to make my knowledge more easily accessible.
