Marty Hinz and Amino Acid Supplementation - snake oil or not?

Looked into Marty Hinz and his amino acid supplementation, as I look into just about anything that might make PD easier. 

I have to say I was already suspicious because lots of pwp consider him either a savior or a quack.  But I looked into his claims.

He published a study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068871/ about one patient who showed great improvement on his amino acid protocol - but
#1, it was only one patient,
#2, it was NOT a clinical trial,
#3 all conflicts of interest are supposed to be identified up front so you can evaluate whether there are any biases. 

#1 - you need many patients to see if something works.  There's one.
#2  - you need a clinical trial of a treatment, carefully set up so that you are really testing both the safety and the effectiveness of the treatment. You want to compare the proposed treatment with no treatment and you want a double blind so neither patients nor doctors know who is taking what (so you can see if there is a placebo effect, and if treatment is better than no treatment, and also so that biases don't get in the way.)
#3 - turns out that Marty sells the supplement that he's testing (no, now it's his daughter who sells it) and that he owns the "independent lab" that tested for "success."   How independent can it be, exactly?

Um.  Fail on all three measures.

Any followup studies?  No.  Hmm.  Wouldn't it make sense to do a test with multiple patients?  It's not that hard if it's a tablet to set it up with a placebo for the no-treatment condition.    Wasn't done.  And virtually the only person who quotes him in subsequent studies is...  Marty Hinz.

What about the efficacy of the compounds he talks about?  Let's look on Pubmed to see what research there is.

Tryptophan and serotonin are low in PD, but their actions are complex and subtle, so "just add more" is not the obvious next move. The only article that I could find about tryptophan supplementation is  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=tryptophan+supplement%2C+parkinsons+treatment and it's an article about probiotics.

Tyrosine - it's well known that tyrosine supplements can interfere with dopamine absorption, so why add it here?  For example, see:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/tyrosine and https://www.rxlist.com/tyrosine/supplements.htm#Interactions 

5-HDP – the only study in the last 40 + years with this supplement has to do with addressing dyskinesia in rats.  Supplementation to improve PD in humans,  um, no.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24004632

Sulfur amino acids - when I search on this in Pubmed I get studies about NAC, which is deficient in PD patients, and supplements are widely available in places like Amazon.com.  I even tried NAC, but it makes my low blood pressure worse, so not using it any more. (Other than the blood pressure I didn't notice anything else.)

What does he claim on his website?  
According to one of his websites, http://amino-acid-therapy.com/neurotransmitters/imbalances-cause-disease-symptoms/  ALL of these conditions are from neurotransmitter imbalance, but he can treat them all 

Sorry, whenever I hear that the same problem causes lots and lots of conditions (pre-menstrual syndrome, cravings, depression, ADHD, PD, addiction...), but this treatment works, I grab my wallet and run. 

If you still want more about Dr. Hinz, go to see this post on Quackwatch:

https://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/hinz.html 

Snake oil.

Image of duck from Pixabay.

He's got the "cure" for Parkinson's. Right.

On his videos, Lonnie Herman swears that he's got the cure for Parkinson's, cancer, interstitial cystitis,  you name it.

He uses lots of medical terms in his PD video.  He found strep in the patient's hematopoetic stem cells (bone marrow).  How?  He found it in the brain.  How?  He found a viral infection and chemicals in the brain.  How?  But don't doctors have to use actual tests, like blood tests, MRIs, biopsies, and so on to look for disease?

An infection in the teeth infected the patient's retina, and "I'm making remedies."

Herman also talks about athetoid movements and how a Parkinson's patient on his video has them.  Except, ahem, athetoid movements don't happen with PD; they happen with cerebral palsy.

Lonnie Herman is a Florida chiropractor who uses his Youtube channel to sell his services.  He is actually licensed to be a chiropractor in Florida (I checked).  But he claims to have "11 years of postgraduate study" but where?  His Facebook page lists the Carrick Institute for Graduate Studies, but when I search for recommendations from them of their graduates in his town, his name is absent from the list. Hm.

I was trying to figure out how he found all these infections in places where you could only find them via biopsy (surgical removal of tissue).  But, um, how does he biopsy the eyes, the bone marrow, and several parts of the brain? 

But then I hear him say that he uses bioresonance.  So what the heck is that?  According to Wikipedia, bioresonance therapy is a "pseudoscientific medical practice in which it is proposed that electromagnetic waves can be use to diagnose and treat human illness."  So he uses this bogus machine to diagnose and miraculously cure pretty much everything?  To quote Dr. Andrew Weil, speaking of bioresonance: "No evidence supports any of these claims.  In fact, the little scientific evidence that does exist refutes them." 

So, once again we have somebody selling hope.  Only, once again, it's snake oil.  .