What is Alzheimer’s Dementia?
It’s not a disease and that’s the important point
In my last post I reported on daily conversations about Lexus and Ann. In the midst of my speech (it is a speech, well rehearsed and repeated often) I use a metaphor:
“Do you recall that in the Nineteenth Century many people died of ‘The Fever’? The doctors of the day saw a set of end-of-life symptoms appearing to their untutored eyes as a single disease. We now know ‘The Fever’ was clearly the body’s response to any number of differing problems, Alzheimer’s is the same”.
Modern specialists have the ‘Fever’ view of Alzheimer’s, they see it as a disease when the science tells us it is a similar appearing set of symptoms with different contributing causes. Why the Alzheimer’s medical community persists in the ‘Fever’ view is a conundrum that I will address in a later newsletter, I attempt to explain it in a chapter in my latest book “Breakthrough, Surviving Alzheimer’s And Why You Can Too”.
To answer the question in the title: Alzheimer’s is the result of the brain’s attempts to protect itself from a number of “insults”. The amyloid plaques we hear so much about are what’s left after the brain has mounted an inflammatory response.
The smart people go after the causes, the not-so-smart (mainstream Alzheimer’s specialists) people hold the misguided belief that dealing with the plaques by cleaning them up, or preventing them forming, will solve the problem. Remember the five FDA registered Alzheimer’s medications? They are reported to do the job required on the amyloid plaques. The outcome for the patient in functionality or life expectancy? Pretty much nothing, possibly a slight temporary uptick with a range of nasty possible side effects.
The root of the treatment problem goes back to the days of Louis Pasteur and germ theory. 20th Century medical practice holds sway today and is rooted in germ theory, fix the symptom and you’ve fixed the problem. Unfortunately for many suffering from chronic complaints such as Alzheimer’s, 20th Century medicine doesn’t cut it, we need 21st Century medicine.
So what is Alzheimer’s?
I’m not calling it Alzheimer’s disease, that’s because it isn’t a disease, it’s a family of symptoms, possibly we should call it “Alzheimer’s Syndrome”
Simply put, Alzheimer’s symptoms are a result of the brain’s inflammatory response to a differing combination and number of around forty (identified so far) possible causal factors. Each person that Dr Bredesen’s teams is treating has a different combination of between ten and twenty five contributing factors. Remember, Dr Bredesen’s teams are arresting and reversing symptoms in over 80% of their patients, they know what they’re doing.
My wife Ann has the following factors: an HLA gene that predisposes her immune system to an ongoing ineffective inflammatory response (mould induced for her), she is insulin resistant (her brain is starved for energy with a normal diet), she is very low on vitamin B12, she has a number of other nutritional, mineral plus hormone issues and her medical history indicates a predisposition for her complaint (she had chickenpox five times, glandular fever more than once).
Find a pill to deal with the issues facing Ann? There is no way, even imaging you could is plain stupid, based in ignorance, or both. Ann’s treatment is ongoing and complicated, but has yielded fantastic results, outliving 25 million people with the same syndrome is phenomenal!
The conclusion to all this? With the right medical methodology (21st Century medicine) Alzheimer’s is most likely treatable. The caveat?…the earlier you respond the more likely a positive result.
Please pass this on; everyone who is coming to grips with Alzheimer’s needs to know what they’re up against and that there’s hope. Hope is the one thing that they have had taken away, and that’s a crime!
Kia Kaha! (Stay Strong)
Peter