“I Would Rather Be the Data”

Jim Koch and his wife were leaving a restaurant in Fort Worth a couple of weeks before we talked. Dinner was over, it was pouring rain, and everyone in the parking lot was running. Jim watched them. He can’t run. His balance isn’t there yet. So he walked to his car and got soaked.

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” he told me. “I’m very content. It’s okay.”

That’s the whole story, really. Everything before and after that moment. What he lost, what he accepted, what he got back, and where things honestly still stand.

A decade of denial

Jim thinks his Parkinson’s symptoms probably started around 2012, when he was in his mid-40s. Balance problems first. Then drooling, which he couldn’t control. He didn’t go to the doctor.

“It wasn’t the doctors not being able to diagnose me,” he said. “It was me being stubborn and refusing to go.”

He is left-handed. That turned out to be useful, and then it wasn’t. The tremors that eventually developed were on his right side, his right arm and his right leg. He could still eat, still write, still do most things. “Only me and my wife knew I had tremors,” he said. He went years hiding it from everyone else.

By 2022, the tremors became undeniable. He finally went to a neurologist and got the diagnosis. He was in his mid-50s.

“I was kind of excited, because now I have an excuse why my golf game is so bad.” A pause. “The issue that I had with golf wasn’t hitting the golf ball. It was getting from the golf cart to the golf ball. I could not do that.”

He stopped playing golf. He stopped running. Parkinson’s, he had always figured, was an old person’s disease. Having it at such a young age required him to entirely rethink who he was.

He also stopped drinking when he got diagnosed. Not because of any interaction with medication. “I told my wife: I can’t pass a field sobriety test sober. I’m not going to take the risk.”

Hitting bottom

The standard treatment for Parkinson’s is Carbidopa-Levodopa, a synthetic dopamine. It’s the gold standard. It made Jim feel normal when he first started taking it.

The problem is the tolerance. Every three months, his doctor adjusted the dosage or the frequency. By the time Jim decided to go to Mexico, he was taking Carbidopa-Levodopa every three hours just to get through the day.

His neurologist, his movement disorder specialist, his physical therapist were all aligned: let’s work on slowing the progression.

“I don’t want to slow it down,” Jim told me. “I don’t want to live this way anymore.”

He was in a dark place. Depression had moved in alongside the anxiety that had been with him for years. “I was reaching for anything.”

The find

He’d heard about ibogaine before. A nephew of his, a US Navy pilot, had mentioned it two years earlier. Some of the nephew’s friends had done it for PTSD. There were early indications it might help Parkinson’s.

Jim had no interest. “I saw it was a psychedelic and I’m like, no, that’s not me.”

Then, in early 2025, he heard Joe Rogan’s episode with Rick Perry and W. Bryan Hubbard. They were talking about ibogaine.

“Rick Perry and Bryan Hubbard are probably the most conservative politicians I’ve ever known. I thought: there must be something here.”

He started researching. Within a few months, he decided to go.

The leap

Jim’s neurologist told him not to go.

“Don’t go, Jim. Don’t do it. There’s not enough data.”

Jim’s response: “I don’t care. I don’t want to wait for the data. I would rather be the data.”

That line still sits with me. I’ve heard a lot of people describe their decision to go to Mexico for ibogaine. Most of them describe something that sounds like desperation dressed up as bravery. Jim wasn’t doing that. He knew exactly what he was saying. He had been watching Western medicine manage his disease for years, and he’d decided he didn’t want to be managed.

Western medicine does a great job of keeping sick people sick.Jim Koch

The treatment

Jim went to a clinic in Cozumel, in the spring of 2025. He was treated by Dr. Omar Calderon and his staff, Louisa and Daisy.

He’d been through enough American medicine to know what it feels like when intake is a formality. This was different from the first conversation.

It was obvious that Dr. Omar and the staff truly cared about me the patient. There were many conversations, real ones, not just paperwork.Jim Koch

They asked him why he was seeking treatment. Then they listened to his answer.

His protocol was different from the typical flood-dose experience most people associate with ibogaine. He microdosed twice daily for 14 days. He was under 24-hour nursing care. A doctor came in once or twice a day. Between doses, there was physical therapy, aquatherapy, sound therapy, yoga, meditation.

He never hallucinated. He never tripped in the way people imagine when they hear “psychedelic.” A few mornings, he told the doctor he thought he’d been “over-served.” What he felt was ataxia: a kind of inability to move freely, a heaviness, for a couple of hours after the morning dose. The nurses were always there.

The first five or six days were the worst. Years of synthetic dopamine were leaving his body at the same time the ibogaine was coming in. “It was like they were having a battle in my stomach,” he said. “I felt very, very nauseous every day for the first five days. But I never once got sick.”

He arrived unable to walk without assistance. He had to have a cane, or someone alongside him.

“I walked out of there completely unassisted.”

A year later, he still is. But the clinic wasn’t the end of the ibogaine protocol. After returning home, Jim continued microdosing on a titrating schedule for eight months, doses decreasing gradually as his body restabilized. He finished in February of this year.

What he witnessed

Jim’s wife didn’t travel with him to Mexico for his 14 day treatment. He stayed in communication with her multiple times per day. The first week was a tough transition. Jim remembers talking to his wife about Day 5, saying “the Ibogaine is not working for me YET, but I know I am in the right place…. I’ve already seen so many miracles.” In addition to neurological treatments, other patients were at the clinic for addiction, trauma, anxiety, and even frontal lobe dementia. “I saw so many miracles from this ‘God-given plant medicine’, even if it didn’t work for me, I’m so glad I’m here.”

The science, in his words

I have notes I keep on my phone about the research into ibogaine for Parkinson’s. At one point during our call, Jim started explaining the mechanism as he understood it.

Parkinson’s patients, he said, lose the ability to transfer dopamine across the blood-brain barrier. That’s why they take synthetic dopamine. But the ibogaine, he believed, had regenerated something that allowed his brain’s naturally produced dopamine to make that transfer on its own again. Some kind of protein. He couldn’t remember the name.

I pulled up my notes. “GDNF,” I said. Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor. In animal models, ibogaine triggers its release. GDNF is a potent neuroprotective growth factor for the dopaminergic neurons that die in Parkinson’s. It’s the most-cited hypothesis for why ibogaine might help the disease, and I dug into what the research actually shows in a companion piece.

“So I’m saying the right words,” Jim said. “Whether or not I really understand them, I don’t know. I just know what it did.”

The honest accounting

One year out, Jim gives me the real version.

Tremors: completely gone. Undetectable. He can hold his hand up and you wouldn’t know. Before the ibogaine, he was taking medication every three hours to prevent them. Since the ibogaine, he has taken zero Carbidopa-Levodopa. None. For 12 months.

Rigidity: “dramatically relieved.” Bearable. Not gone, but different.

Anxiety: completely gone. Before the treatment, he told me about going to a lake with friends, six or seven couples, everyone floating in the water and drinking beers and telling stories for hours. He couldn’t relax for a single minute. “How am I going to get back in that boat? I worried about it for hours.” Every little thing. Going to the bathroom. Crossing a room. “That is completely gone now.”

Depression: gone. His wife, he said, would tell you the non-motor symptoms were the biggest improvement.

Balance and gait: still an issue. If you watched him walk now, you’d notice something. But if you’d watched him walk before, you’d be stunned by the difference. He came in walking a shuffle, three- or four-inch steps, feet never leaving the ground. He’s taking real steps now.

Will he go back? He has no current plans to. He hasn’t taken any ibogaine since February. But if Dr. Calderon told him it was time, he’d go in a heartbeat.

How long will the reset last? Nobody knows. It may last another day. It may last his lifetime.

The work

I asked Jim what post-integration looks like for a Parkinson’s patient. For addiction or trauma, integration means coaching, journaling, therapy, the psychological work of making sense of what happened and rebuilding around it. For Parkinson’s, Jim’s answer was immediate: physical therapy. That’s the integration. The ibogaine gives you a reset; the PT is how you use it.

Jim is doing physical therapy every week. A year out, he’s still going. Before the ibogaine, every session showed regression. The gains he’d made one week were gone by the next. Now he’s holding. He’s improving.

He was also connected with a clinic in Bee Cave, Texas called Wired, which does electromuscular reeducation. Their primary work is injury recovery, stroke recovery, paralysis, and performance work with high-level athletes. Parkinson’s is new territory for them.

The way Jim explains the two treatments working together is the clearest framing I’ve heard: ibogaine fixes the connections in the brain. The electromuscular reeducation reconnects the pathways from the brain down to the body. “If I went down for the therapy and did nothing when I got back, I’d probably be right back to where I was.”

He’s been in his sixties relearning how to walk. Not shuffling. Taking real steps. Swinging his arms. Heel to toe. Things a person just does without thinking, that he has to think about deliberately now.

I’m relearning how to walk like a toddler. The things you take for granted.Jim Koch

The mission

In the past year, Jim has referred over 25 people to ibogaine treatment for Parkinson’s. He estimates it’s helping about 70% of them.

“Although ibogaine can perform miracles, it does not work for everyone,” he said. “And you don’t want people to think: I’m gonna go down and do ibogaine, it’s gonna fix everything. It doesn’t work that way. It takes work.”

He’s involved with Americans for Ibogaine. He goes to Parkinson’s seminars and networking events and tells his story whenever he can. At a Texans for Greater Mental Health event last November, he met a researcher in UT’s neurology department. They’ve been talking ever since. That puts the collaboration in different territory from the psychology-side PTSD and addiction research that has absorbed most of the post-executive order attention and funding. The UT study will be privately funded and is scheduled to start at the end of 2026.

“There’s a lot of focus right now on ibogaine for PTSD and addiction. Very little on neurological conditions,” Jim said. “That’s where I’m trying to push.”

He told me he’s lost all desire for material possessions. He couldn’t explain whether it was the ibogaine or just the life reset that came with it, but either way it happened and it’s still true.

“My goal in life is to spread the word. This is something that might work. It doesn’t work for everybody. But don’t ever give up hope.”

One day at a time

Jim wants to run again. That’s the first goal. Before golf, before anything else. You can’t run if you can’t stand on one foot, and he can’t stand on one foot yet. His balance isn’t there. One foot into the next foot, arms swinging for counterbalance, weight transferring forward. He’s working on it, week by week, at Wired and in PT.

He’ll let me know when he gets there.

In the meantime: every morning, right hand, in front of his face. Watching. If it’s still, the day is okay.

I may be shaking like a leaf tomorrow. But today I’m doing good.Jim Koch

He’s been doing that for over a year now.