Welcome to the Seacoast Parkinson Community Project

This website is the product of a lot of conversations among a small group of friends with Parkinson and care partners. We've all experienced the challenge of finding local and relevant information. So we set out to fill in the gaps--to connect people to resources and people to one another. Not sure where that will take us but it gets us out of the house and meeting new people. Not a bad thing at all.

Let's start with some LAQs about tulips and apostrophes

What's an LAQ you ask? Excellent question and a perfect example of a "Likely to be Asked Question" about this website. Here are a few more:

Q: What Seacoast are you talking about?

A: The Seacoast where Massachusetts and Maine nearly touch only to be separated by 13 miles of New Hampshire coast line.

Q: What does the tulip represent?

A: For a great explanation, we turn to our friends in Australia at Parkinson's NSW (New South Wales): "In 2005 the tulip was adopted as the official symbol of Parkinson’s at the 9th World Parkinson’s Disease Day Conference in Luxembourg. However, the flower had been informally associated with the disease for more than 20 years prior to that.

Back in 1980, a Dutch horticulturalist named J.W.S. Van der Wereld—who was living with Parkinson’s—developed a new red and white variant of the tulip. He named his newly cultivated flower the Dr James Parkinson tulip in honour of the medico who first documented the features of Parkinson’s disease in his 1817 publication An Essay on the Shaking Palsy."

Q: Speaking of Dr. Parkinson, where is the missing apostrophe in the word "Parkinsons."

A: We knew this was coming. But it's not just our organization that is inconsistent or downright confused in the treatment of the apostrophe. Take, for example, this comment from the editor of a prominent medical journal: "Recently, several members of the Applied Radiology editorial advisory board and I had a—let’s call it a discussion—about our policy requiring the use of the nonpossessive form of condition-specific eponyms (eg, Parkinson disease rather than Parkinson’s disease).

"First—and this may seem pedantic—using the possessive form of the person for whom the condition is named is grammatically incorrect. The condition is not their personal disorder but is one named after them. In addition, the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Manual of Style, the US National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization all agree that condition-specific eponyms should not include the apostrophe."

That makes sense to me.