Sarah Lidstone has a long history with the medical world. A ballet dancer from the age of 3, she developed acute scoliosis and wore a back brace throughout much of her teens. “I spent a lot of my childhood in doctors’ offices,” she says with a wide Cheshire grin. “I loved carrying my X-rays around when I was 10.”
The brace gradually coaxed Lidstone’s body to straighten itself out, but her experience left her with an enduring fascination for medicine and a desire to ease the suffering of others. In college she gravitated to brain science, and particularly to Parkinson’s disease, a crippling condition caused by chronically low dopamine levels in the brain. Dopamine, in addition to moderating mood, controls brain regions crucial to movement. Lidstone was fascinated by the brain’s dopamine systems and by these patients, who were trapped in bodies that wouldn’t respond properly.
After starting her doctorate work in neurology in 2003 at the University of British Columbia, Lidstone led a rather odd brain-imaging experiment. She brought 40 patients with mild Parkinson’s into the lab for a simple drug therapy and explained that some would get their usual dose of Parkinson’s medication, which boosts the brain’s dopamine levels. The others, she said, would get a placebo — an inactive pill that looked just like their usual drug. Then they would lie in a high-resolution positron emission tomography (PET) scanner for a grueling 90 minutes while the machine took pictures in 2-millimeter increments of their nucleus accumbens, a region deep in the brain that (among other things) controls reward and motivation.
When Lidstone’s patients emerged from the scanner, many of them moved easily, as one would expect after a dose of their medication. One older patient with a tall, stooped frame arrived in a wheelchair. He took the pill, sat through the scan, and then walked out past the wheelchair and up a flight of stairs to the debriefing room. There, Lidstone dropped a bomb on him: There was no drug. Everyone in the trial got the same thing — a simple placebo pill.
“When I told him he actually got a placebo, he laughed at me,” Lidstone says. “He was like, ‘Are you serious? I can’t believe I was able to do this on my own without my medication.’ ”
