Essay On L-Dopa

In the movie Dr. Sawyer and a team of other doctors worked on a group of elderly patients who were diagnosed with a sleeping disease. The disease made the patients cringe up and become immobile for years even decades. They were put into a hospital to live out the rest of their lives, until Dr. Sawyer came. He was able to figure out that the patients were still alive and aware inside. Their reflexes still worked because he was able to throw a ball towards them and they would sense it coming and catch it. This lead to Dr. Sawyer to believe he could awaken them, he went to a showing of a new drug called L-Dopa. L-Dopa is designed to be used for parkinson 's disease and because the patients Dr. Sawyer is working with showed similar signs to parkinson 's disease he wanted to try L-Dopa to see if it would help at all.

The hospital only allowed Dr. Sawyer to attempt this on one patient as a test, Leonard Lowe was chosen to be the test subject. Leonard had been diagnosed with sleeping disorder ever since he was a small boy, he had been asleep for 30 years before given L-Dopa. Dr, Sawyer gave Leonard L-Dopa and after many hours he awoke. He was able to walk, talk, and do everything such as a normal person could. The drug was able to awaken all the patients with the disease for a short amount of time. However, the drug soon stopped working the patients began to show symptoms of the disease and no matter how much L-Dopa was given their condition still worsened. Soon they were back to where they were in the beginning. Dr.Sawyer kept researching and attempting to find a cure for them and although there were short awakenings there was never anything close to what happened when L-Dopa was first