Treating Alzheimer’s Dementia with 21st Medicine, what does it look like?

Getting your Alzheimer’s doctor up to the standard of your auto technician.

I first came across the term “21st Century Medicine” in Dr Bredesen’s publications and thought it apt for what we’ve faced with Ann.

So what is 21st medicine? That’s easy, it’s your doctor doing his or her job properly, the human body is complex, it follows that resolving some health issues is going to be complicated. That sounds reasonable but our journey with Ann’s Alzheimer’s has shown that the Alzheimer’s medical establishment has itself seduced by the irrational dream that a very complex condition can be cured with a pill.

Metaphors are helpful to explain difficult concepts so here’s one that I’ve seen and borrowed (thanks Dr Perlmutter): Imagine your car has a smoking exhaust and you take it to your auto repair shop, experience tells us that the technician would immediately begin a complex diagnostic process to discover what was causing the blue smoke emitting from the car. The process would be deliberate and stepped, with a strong logical thread and data gathering protocol covering a raft of metrics. It’s likely the problem has a number of contributing causes which will need addressing.

Let’s take the car to the “Alzheimer’s” car clinic… You will be told gravely that the car has “smoking exhaust syndrome” and that it’s unfixable. You’ll also be told that it being unfixable is ‘state of the art’, everybody in the profession agrees that nothing can be done. You’ll also be told that a miracle quick fix is on the way and in the meantime some interim simple symptom-reduction treatments are available. Many of us who tried to keep ailing old cars on the road when young and penniless will have hopefully poured some “guaranteed to fix smoking engines” goo down the oil filler. The positive effects, if any, were temporary and minimal. Alzheimer’s medications are as useless and can be very harmful, unlike the goo.

The story illustrates the contrast between 21st and 20th century medicine. It’s not too hard to see the difference between the two approaches in our metaphor. The first example will lead to identification and remediation of a good number of contributing factors and has a high chance of fixing the problem. The second won’t achieve anything, there is no way it will ever fix the problem.

20th century medicine assumes that dealing with symptoms fixes the problem, it has its roots in germ theory, a story for another day. 21st century medicine goes after the causes and is a lot more successful, Dr Bredesen’s teams illustrate this with their very high rates of success treating Alzheimer’s patients. The Alzheimer’s medical establishment is stuck in a 20th century medical paradigm, looking for simple answers to complex problems and failing comprehensively, a 0% success rate is as comprehensive as failure gets!

Here are the key facts about Alzheimer’s: each patient Bredesen’s teams are treating has between ten and twenty five contributing factors from a possible selection of around forty identified so far. Each patient has a different combination of contributing factors, each Alzheimer’s patient has a different set of problems.

Each Alzheimer’s patient has different things wrong with them. Alzheimer’s as a definition is so loose that you might as well say the person is sick, the definition isn’t a great deal more useful than that. To call Alzheimer’s a diagnosis is ridiculous as “diagnosis” conveys a sense of known common contributing factors and a firm protocol for addressing them.

My wife Ann is an example of 21st century medicine producing an unexpected result, so what does her treatment look like? I cover this thoroughly in my latest book but can easily sum it up:

• extensive testing has been carried out to establish contributing factors. This is ongoing with a recent round of testing finding more issues needing attention

• a thorough investigation of her medical history was carried out to establish possible contributing factors and to understand the progression of her symptoms in detail. We established that she had chickenpox five times as a child, hugely significant as it pointed out the roots of her Azheimer’s

• the above investigations were examined in the framework of extensive research documenting the types of Alzheimer’s and their typical progressions.

In other words a proper job was done so we knew what we were up against and could lay out a program to address the condition. What we didn’t count on was the huge resistance and lethal incompetence of the Alzheimer’s medical world. Ann came under their control as she went into full time care in mid 2017 and they were determined that she should die in the prescribed manner. Two years of horror story followed where I went to war with the Alzheimers establishment to save Ann’s life. I’ve succeeded in that goal and we’re now faced with the significant damage wrought on Ann by these people determined to ignore her inconvenient truth and the huge moral dilemma it poses for them.

Here’s the link to my latest book “Breakthrough, Surviving Alzheimer’s And Why You Can Too”. I wrote the book to serve as a roadmap to help others avoid the pitfalls we’ve encountered and to point people towards a more hopeful outcome than they’ve been told they’re facing with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. For such a reluctant writer, I remain amazed that I’ve written a book, let alone two. In case the cynic in you thinks this newsletter is a means to grow book sales and enrich myself, I can assure you being an Alzheimer’s author is not the way to riches!

The moment you come up against off-the-cuff prognostications with minimal data gathered, you know you’re experiencing 20th century medicine. Every step of the way ask yourself “would my auto technician be this cursory?” If the answer is “no” it’s time to start hunting for what you need to deal with Alzheimer’s, 21st century medicine.

Kia Kaha! Stay Strong

Peter