BEST I FACED: SUGAR RAY LEONARD

Ali probably would've ended up in the same condition if he'd skipped the Spinks and Holmes fights.

 

Wikipedia isn't a primary source. I put the information out there and let the readers choose if they want to accept the medical opinion of No Neck or Dr. Michael S. Okun, national medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation:

Boxing legend Muhammad Ali will be laid to rest Friday, one week after he died at age 74. Ali had been publicly battling Parkinson’s disease for more than three decades, so it came as a surprise to many that his official cause of death, according to family spokesman Bob Gunnell, was “septic shock due to unspecified natural causes.”

“Sepsis is the body’s overwhelming and life-threatening response to an infection, which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure and death,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


“A direct link from Parkinson’s to sepsis is a long jump. However, there are several features of Parkinson’s – especially later in the course of the illness – that can place a patient at higher risk for [developing] an infection, which can get into the bloodstream and cause them to become septic,” said Dr. Michael S. Okun, national medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation.

Parkinson’s patients are at higher risk when hospitalized because the disease “can set up a scenario that decreases the threshold for getting an infection and makes it more difficult to clear the infection,” said Okun, who is also the chairman of neurology at the University of Florida.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/09/health/muhammad-ali-parkinsons-sepsis/index.html

To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his whole sense of self depends on not understanding it. Did he die from Parkinson's Syndrome? No. Did the Parkinson's Syndrome contribute to his death as Dr. Michael S. Okun, national medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation opined? I will let the readers judge

 

Not really Saint, you sure you thought that answer through, if you do change every month !!! then we part company matey, I have my favs for 50 years , and they never ever change, sometimes add newer ones, but generally they stay. stay safe buddy.

 

So he picks Hearns five out of ten , that wouldnt be the Hearns you beat, by any chance ?
Some fighters take that approach, big up the opponent you beat, they think we cant see through the façade, C, mon guys. stay safe.

 

We’ll have to agree to disagree. Btw you just posted something that supports what I said…that linking Parkinson’s to sepsis is a “long jump.”

 

He admits Hearns beat him in the rematch and that the decision was bogus. Sounds consistent to me.

In his prime he only lost to Duran and he avenged that one making the guy quit. Should he pick Duran in every category and pretend the second fight didn’t happen?

 

Link?

What other diagnoses can you make of current fighters based on video with your vast medical knowledge?

 

I'll get back in this discussion but I'm more interested in a search for the truth than in scoring debating points or making internet foes. Members of Ali's entourage said they saw a marked decline after Manila. On one hand he was getting older and the laws of physiology are immutable so his reflexes were bound to slow. That's just nature taken its course. On the other hand a healthy man in his thirties shouldn't have altered speech and impaired motor skills. Something wasn't right.

 

What truth are you looking for?

Is it a search for the exact point in time when Ali should have quit? Science doesn’t know that — I mean most neurologists (probably all of them) would advise against boxing at all. Is the suggestion that if he had hung up the gloves immediately after the Foreman fight, or the Shavers or Young or Frazier III fights that he would have not later had Parkinson’s?

Parkinson’s has a genetic element. Perhaps all combat sports people should be gene-tested before ever sparring or entering a contest. There are others including lifestyle and environmental elements to causation — including head trauma. But not everyone who suffers from head trauma gets Parkinson’s. There’s no predictive test that I’m aware of.

And diminished capacity is another one — while he may have been diminished from what he previously was, he was also higher-functioning than almost all people. He beat Joe Frazier, so he was higher-functioning as a boxer than Frazier was, and had diminished less than the Frazier who beat him in the FOTC, right?

I guess I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, or get at.

What I keep trying to get at is that it’s easy to look back knowing someone has Parkinson’s and act like it was known at the time or should have been easily deducted. Yet Ferdie Pacheco never brought up that possibility, nor did the Mayo Clinic or UCLA medical facility after he underwent a full battery of tests.

Has anyone looked at video of all of Frazier’s interviews over the course of his life to see if there wasn’t anything that diminished? We know Thomas Hearns has speech problems but he doesn’t have Parkinson’s (as far as I or anyone else knows).

And I haven’t seen where any documentary maker or @mark ant have been able to analyze interviews of current boxers to tell us this guy or that guy has Parkinson’s — so if they have these incredible powers that actual medically trained doctors don’t have, why don’t they use these powers for good and tell us who’s next?

 

He obviously slowed down towards the end of his caeer. That's simply physiology and it's normal. He was exhibiting neurological deficits in his thirties. That's not normal. Your point about that we learned for certain he was diagnosed with Parkinsons in 1984 and that it's easy to look back at the latter stages of his career and say "Aha, he was performing poorly so therefore his poor performances are a function of being in the early stages of Parkinsons Disease" is a fair one. OTOH Dr. Stanley Fahn who was the first physician to diagnose him can't rule out he was already in the early stages of the disease before that. He already had abnormal brain scans at 39 and exhibited neurological deficits at 38.

 

This is blatantly false.

Find me one reference to Ali having Parkinson’s before he was diagnosed in 1984.

 

We don't have a formal diagnosis until 1984. Here's an analogy. My mom broke her hip when she was 78. When they took xrays her arthericlerosis

Is this fair? We can't rule it out be we know he was exhibiting neurological deficits as detected in a physical examination when he was thirty eight years old and had an abnormal brain scan when he was thirty nine years old. Whether or not he had Parkinson's Syndrome prior to 1984 we can not say to a mathematical certainty but we can say his declining performance was more than just a function of getting older.

 

I am replying to the blatant falsehood that it was common knowledge that he had Parkinson’s. It wasn’t because literally NO ONE knew it.

We can 100% rule out that it was common knowledge (especially based on the brilliant reasoning that he didn’t throw enough punches in a fight, lol).

If low punch output is a diagnostic tool, I can give you a long list of fighters with Parkinson’s.