'When you are really desperate to believe something, then you will'

John Todd has CBD, but he can't just walk it away. He and his doctor tell Chloe Hadjimatheou the bleak truth about living with the disease... and how The Salt Path gave him a brief glimmer of hope that is now extinguished

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When a neurologist told John Todd in 2023 that he didn't have Parkinson's, he was relieved. "Whatever it is, it can't be worse than Parkinson's," he thought. But the doctor told him it was worse.

Todd, who is 67 and from Surrey, had corticobasal degeneration, or CBD, a rare neurological condition. It is in the same family as Parkinson's, but more acute and rapid in its progress. The trajectory is steep and brutal. Life expectancy is tragically short about six to eight years from the onset of symptoms and patients eventually lose the ability to control their body and often suffer cognitive decline as well.

Raynor Winn's bestselling memoir, The Salt Path, recounts how she and her husband, Moth, walked the 630-mile South West Coast Path soon after he was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration. The couple say that walking helped reverse Moth's symptoms and kept him alive for an astonishing 18 years.

It was Todd's wife, Bridget, who first came across The Salt Path. Todd says he began reading it and was immediately absorbed, believing Moth's diagnosis to be similar to his own. "I had sort of got used to the fact that the condition couldn't be reversed, and for a moment, reading the book, it was great thinking maybe it could," he recalls. "I wanted to believe it." Todd says that when he was first given his diagnosis his doctor was blunt with him, describing how the condition would spread across his limbs, that he would be likely to suffer from dementia and either die from choking or pneumonia. There was no treatment, he said, and he told Todd that he probably had only four or five years left.