Alzheimer’s Disease: What We Know and What We’re Learning

paul corrao, m.d. With all due respect, I suggest you also explore the way "old age" has been made into a disease, and the extent to which "Alzheimers" serves the needs of commercial, corporate, entrepreneurial medicine. There is a lot of third party money at stake in feeding the medical-industrial monster, and this is just one example of that. Explore how "soft" and subjective the diagnosis of Alzheimer's really is, and how this diagnosis has exploded since the god of commerce so completely occupied the sacred temple of medicine. And consider the extent to which the dehumanizing, chemical lobotomy drugs result in a self-fulfilling prophesy: it people aren't demented before these powerful synthetic chemicals are given, in due course they certainly will be. Consider all the research grants, academic institutions and professional "specialists" whose careers and existence depend on these diagnoses, and the enlistment of individuals as patients to satisfy related needs.

My father-in-law has Lewy Body which is a form of Alzheimer's disease and we have been caring for him with my Mother-in-law for two years. We take my father-in-law to daycare and I don't know what we would have done without that service. The people that work at the facility truly put their heart into their work. We have felt over whelmed for a while and have just recently involved hospice only now do I feel that we are getting some support that we have desperately needed.

I am so glad you are doing this show. Those who are caring for Alzheimer's patients need all the support they can get.
I hope at some point during the shows you will be able to provide information about some of the help available out there for folks providing home-care for people with Alzheimer's. I know you don't plug products on shows, but we are caring for a dementia patient at home, and I developed a monitoring/paging system which gives caregivers a chance to regain their lives and still provide for the safety of their patients. Even if you don't mention our product, I hope you can provide people with the information that there are such caregiver supports out there.
Thanks,
Thomas Ehrenberg
802-257-7827 or 387-3100

paul corrao, m.d. I studied neuropathology at several institutions, including the AFIP. The classic triad associated with dementia- neurofibrillary tangles, intranuclear inclusions, and amyloid plaques- can only be diagnosed with a brain biopsy or at post mortem. The kicker, though, is that these findings are only statistically associated with Alzheimer's. You can have the disease without one of the three, and even without all three. Conversely, cases are known where the clinical picture of Alzheimer's is described in the absence of the above triad. The same is true of the assertions about genetic changes. The changes described are only statistically associated with greater risk for dementia. In any given case, all bets are off. I don't deny that there are people who exhibit a dementia-like picture, but I contend that there are economic, political, sociological and philosophical considerations to this issue that are being overlooked or ignored. I have in mind the extent to which we seek a pharmacological cure to every human problem; that the problem at times is the disposition of an elderly relative, in the face on great social pressures otherwise; the fate of property; the possibility that what we are are really seeing is a biological manifestation of the limits and destructiveness of hyperindividualism in American life; the excessive pressures to produce and consume in our culture, which renders other forms of nonmaterial contribution, like wisdom, superfluous and counter-productive in modern life; and so forth. Readers should not miss the role this issue is playing, for example, in fund raising for NHPR. Also, as our economy becomes more and more a service one, raw material in the form of dependent individuals is needed to keep the system going. Nhpr has a right to raise funds, but the issues I raise should not be omitted in the process.