Rush Limbaugh attacks Michael J. Fox: ” …he was either off the medication or he was acting. He is an actor, after all.”

(Click the pic to view the video ad.)

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh accused Michael J. Fox, actor and Parkinson's Disease victim, of deliberately going off of his meds to appear on camera with exaggerated symptoms of his disease for dramatic effect. Fox appeared in a recent Clair McHaskill (D-MO) Senate campaign ad, touting the need for stem cell research. Limbaugh even goes so far as to accuse Fox of faking his symptoms all together.

Audio-MP3: "I stated when I saw the ad, I was commenting to you about it, that he was either off the medication or he was acting. He is an actor, after all."

Rush further claims in his broadcast that he’s gotten a "plethora of emails" claiming Fox has admitted in interviews that he goes off his medication. A tireless search of the Internet produced no such record of any interview, or any statement in which Fox has ever admitted or even suggested that he ever goes off his Parkinson's treatment at all, let alone for the purposes of shaking it up for the television audience.

Dr. Daniel comments on this C&L website: “The chorea that Michael J Fox has in that ad comes from chronic use of dopamine agonists in the context of Parkinson's. They're movements from the medicine, not the disease itself. Although he might have odd movements OFF of his meds, they wouldn't look like the ones in the ad. They'd look like the Parkinson's-like presentation of Muhammed Ali's Dementia Pugilistica. In addition, those movements are hard to imitate accurately because they stem from circuits between the basal ganglia and cortex that you can't just turn off or on. Those aren't volitional circuits. There is little chance he was acting, and if he was, he could only accentuate slightly movementse already had. In other words, this is as tragic as it looks.”

LSB: Rush, have you no shame? Is there anyone or anything that you will not attack, any low you will not seek, or any personal tragedy you will not exploit in the service of your conservative cause?

UPDATE: Fox responded to Limbaugh’s smear.