What Carly Simon Made Me Think About

The patterns I see when another public figure is diagnosed with Parkinson's.

I grew up with Carly Simon’s music, and I have always loved her. So when she announced last month that she has Parkinson’s disease at the age of 83, it caught my attention in more ways than one.

From the announcement, she spoke candidly about some of the non-motor aspects of the disease, particularly the apathy and depression that can accompany Parkinson’s. These symptoms are real and serious, I hear about them frequently from people with Parkinson’s and their partners and they don’t get enough attention. I happen to know how closely both can be connected to the microbiome and that also doesn’t get enough attention beyond academic research. Her willingness to address them in her announcement was important. Apathy and depression are only one of many important aspects of Parkinson’s that her story brings into view that are rarely, if ever discussed. There are a few connections in her story that captured my attention.

Looking for Patterns

I have started working on a new book, The New Parkinson’s Paradigm, with my co-authors Lisa Szymanski and Chris Modrack. Lisa has young onset Parkinson’s, and Chris’s husband has Parkinson’s. Chris, like me, has turned her attention from a previous career to a second career in nutrition and researching Parkinson’s. While working on the book, Lisa and I have been going back through our interviews from our documentary, Voices of Parkinson’s. We have interviewed more than 30 Parkinson’s patients and a dozen or so care partners for this project.

Looking at those conversations again has reinforced something that we began to notice fairly early in the process but came increasingly difficult to ignore as the project expanded. Despite the incredible uniqueness of each of their lives, the people we interviewed showed remarkably similar patterns. Their lives often reflected decades of accumulated physical, emotional, environmental, infection/immune, metabolic, and spiritual stress. Somewhere along the way, there was a point at which it became much more difficult for them to adapt and recover from the stressors. We tentatively called it “unmasking” the Parkinson’s as we looked at their timelines.

Resilience Is Not Limitless

As I read Carly Simon’s announcement, I also thought about her life. By any measure, she has lived through tremendous personal challenges and loss. Fame elicits a heavy toll. She wrote about them in her book. I don’t look at her story and see someone who was fragile. Quite the opposite. I see someone who adapted to an extraordinary amount over many decades.

Resilience is an incredible gift, but resilience is not limitless. Every time the body meets a stressor and recovers, that recovery draws on a finite reserve. A hard year, an infection, a surgery, a loss — each one asks the body to adapt, and most of the time it does. But adaptation has a cost, and those costs accumulate quietly. For a long while there are no obvious consequences, which is part of what makes this so easy to overlook. The reserve is being spent, but nothing looks wrong.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jing (Essence) is the finite, foundational reserve of constitutional vitality and resilience inherited at birth. While proper rest and nutrition supply renewable daily energy, chronic stress, overwork, and lifestyle strains force the body to draw directly from this irreplaceable biological capital. This framework acts as an ancient counterpart to what is known as allostatic load, illustrating how cumulative physiological wear-and-tear steadily degrades our baseline reserves. Over time, this unmitigated drain accelerates aging, leaving the body increasingly vulnerable to systemic exhaustion and illness.

What I have come to believe, from the Voices of Parkinson’s interviews and from years of research, is that Parkinson’s often appears at the point where that reserve has been drawn down too far. It looks less like a single event and more like the moment the body can no longer keep up with the demands being placed on it. That is why I pay attention to the whole arc of a person’s life rather than to any one diagnosis or symptom. To understand where someone arrived, you have to look at the bigger picture. That is why Lisa and I found it so important to listen and record the journeys of people with Parkinson’s.

The Hidden Weight of Surgery

In her story, I read that Carly Simon had undergone three joint replacement surgeries. That’s a lot, and it’s also an indication that the body’s repair of collagen and connective tissue has been disrupted. I’ve written about the connection to our food systems and collagen issues in the Weston Price Wise Traditions quarterly newsletter. I don’t know whether those surgeries had anything to do with the timing of her diagnosis, but I see potential red flags because each event is a major stressor on multiple levels.

The surgeries remind me of a conversation I had years ago with our dear friend Jane from our Colorado Parkinson’s support group. Jane developed Parkinson’s not long after having a knee replacement, and at the time I found myself wondering whether we sometimes underestimate the biological demands of major surgery. I asked her specifically about the metal in her artificial joint, and we discussed it at length. As I recall, she may even have gone back to have some of the metal removed. At the time, what I didn’t discuss with her was how the entire process impacted her level of activity, sleep and overall stress.

A joint replacement is not simply an orthopedic procedure. It represents a period during which the body must respond to a remarkable number of stressors all at once. There is the tissue injury of being cut open and the inflammatory response required for healing. There are antibiotics that inevitably alter the microbiome, and some antibiotics are harder to bounce back from. There may be general anesthesia, with its own effects on metabolism and brain physiology. As we age, it becomes more difficult to recover from anesthesia. There is connective tissue remodeling that continues for months with increased nutrient demands, implanted materials that become part of the body’s environment, disruption of normal movement during recovery, changes in sleep, and the emotional stress that often accompanies a prolonged rehabilitation.

Many people recover just fine, because the body is remarkably adaptive. Yet surgery is still a period of enormous biological demand. I think this may be one of the most underappreciated stressors in Carly Simon’s timeline.

Grief and the Lungs

Stress isn’t only physical, of course. Carly Simon has been open about the challenges in her life, particularly her marriage to James Taylor. There is a sadness in her words when she mentions the relationship.

Traditional Chinese medicine has long associated the lungs with grief. Whether or not one accepts that framework, I found it interesting that unresolved grief emerged repeatedly in the Voices of Parkinson’s interviews. And in Carly Simon’s life, she writes about the grief and difficulty of loving a man who was a heroin addict.

My research in Parkinson’s has increasingly led me to think about chronic pulmonary ecology, mycobacteria, and the possibility that we have paid far less attention to the lungs than they deserve in understanding all chronic disease — not just Parkinson’s. After one of my recent podcasts, several people living with Parkinson’s left comments saying that changes in their breathing had preceded their diagnosis. I asked each of them to reach out because I wanted to learn more, but so far I haven’t heard back. It’s a thread I pull on in my book Connected and in my Substack essay Everything Is Tuberculosis.

The Microphone Question

What does any of this have to do with Carly Simon’s Parkinson’s announcement?

Pardon my wandering. It will give you some idea of how I tend to connect the dots and ask questions. Even something as ordinary as a microphone in a singing career raises questions for me. Singers spend decades with microphones inches from their mouths — sometimes with their lips right on the mic. Sometimes they use their own; sometimes they perform with equipment supplied by venues. I don’t know whether that is an important fact or not, but I’ve been thinking about it since I first heard that Neil Diamond has Parkinson’s. That announcement came around the time I was deep down the TB rabbit hole. After seeing Neil Diamond, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, and other performers develop Parkinson’s, I found myself wondering whether there are environmental exposures to mycobacteria we have never seriously considered.

There Is No Single Cause

I offer the microphone idea not because I think it is the answer. It is another factor relating to the microbiome that reacts to stress. Surgery, antibiotics, anesthesia, grief, the lungs, an exposure no one has thought to measure — each is belongs on the stress timeline. Together they show the building stressors.

The more I work on this new book, the less interested I become in searching for a single cause of Parkinson’s. There isn’t just one thing. I understood that directly from twenty plus years of searching with John. Our Parkinson’s paper, Gut, Brain and Glycocalyx: A Portrait of Parkinson’s, explains why that is the case and how many different things can contribute to something named “Parkinson’s”.

Our medical system has become extraordinarily good at specialization. The difficulty is that biology has no departments or specialties. Everything is happening at the same time inside the same person. It’s a system, not a collection of separate parts — and stressors have a huge impact on the system.

Reading a Life as a System

That is why we started creating the stress timelines from Voices of Parkinson’s for our book. They are an attempt to visualize a lifetime of interacting stressors and adaptations. When you step back far enough, the pattern often becomes easier to see than any individual event.

Here is an example using Carly Simon’s life.

Timeline based on publicly available biographical information and published interviews. Stress categories represent a conceptual framework for cumulative biological load and should not be interpreted as evidence of causation.

Carly Simon’s announcement last month reminded me of a few questions I’ve had that keep popping up. Even more than that, it confirmed the stress framework we are building for the book. Another opportunity to keep asking better questions.

If you or someone you love has Parkinson’s, consider writing out your own stress timeline. It may help you find some avenues for relief that you haven’t considered.