Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease or disorder, whichever way you wish to categorize it. The current thinking is that unless someone finds a cure, treatment, or some way to address the cognitive decline associated with this neurologic disorder adequately, we will be swamped, drowning in effect in Alzheimer’s patients who require 24-hours-a-day care. It is known as the Silver Tsunami.

There is no question about it. As we improve our ability to live longer, thanks to advances in medical technology, we also decrease our ability to pay trillions of dollars for care worldwide. Too many questions are still involved in this complicated area, but one thing we know is that whoever finds the goose that lays the golden egg will be assured to be a billionaire.

Racing to find ways to address Alzheimer’s or other forms of cognitive decline has proven to be an area of intense interest. We have no idea or a limited idea regarding what causes Alzheimer’s, what neurobiological elements are involved in it, and when Alzheimer’s might first present itself.

Testing, whether paper and pencil and active questioning, serologic testing, or even dermatologic testing, have led us to too many blind alleys. The thinking had been that we nailed down the culprit, and it was a material called tau produced in cells in the brain and even in the skin.

Is tau truly diagnostic of Alzheimer’s, or is it something that is produced naturally in everyone’s body and varying levels of it may not be diagnostic of a cognitive declining disorder? When not involved in brain tissue entanglements, tau is natural and serves a good, supportive purpose in brain cells.

Today, I came across two interesting studies. One was that tea and coffee might, somehow, be involved in forestalling cognitive decline. My antenna immediately went up since it seemed that this was yet another attempt by someone to promote their product, namely coffee or tea.

We know that tea has specific properties that may help maintain our health. If you want an example, you might look at countries like India, where people drink tea exclusively and have numbers of citizens living over the age of 100.

I had seen an article about a woman who was 104 who had just learned to read. If anything, that is an outstanding accomplishment, but the fact that she was over 100 and learning to read was astonishing. Was it due to her drinking tea all of her life?

Findings from some research studies may prove interesting but not diagnostic. Another study that came to my attention was of persons with alopecia Arriaga (AA), a hair loss problem. The investigators found that persons with AA “were more likely to develop any dementia such as Alzheimer’s or unspecified dementia than the control group.” While this may seem shocking or exciting, please keep in mind that it may only point to the immune system having an active role in our developing certain types of dementia and depression.

Therefore, anyone with a disordered immune system may develop varying types of dementia. Dementia is wide-ranging and often difficult to nail down, even in clinical practice.

Many dementia misdiagnoses have been written in stone in charts, and then the patients have been treated accordingly. I suppose you think this is unacceptable or unethical. In that case, I agree with you, but I would also suggest that we need more robust testing, and we also need persons who are aware of their own biases when they test. Too often, older patients suffer from being the recipients of this ageist bias.

And it’s not restricted to dementia. A physician once told me he was asked to consult on a patient in a hospital. When he met the man, he asked one question: Has your hat size increased? After reviewing the man’s chart, the physician thought he might have gout, and an increase in head size would be potentially diagnostic. He was correct, and the man then received the proper treatment. Previously, they diagnosed him with hearing and cognitive deficits. Was it because he was elderly?

Allow me to provide a small bit of insight regarding testing. Psychiatrists are not trained the way psychologists are in psychological testing, yet they are expected to use cognitive testing in their practice, primarily in hospital settings.

The internet provides many tests from pharmaceutical firms to test for various psychiatric/psychological disorders. The tests may, in my estimation, not be as adequately validated as we might wish. Validation of test administration is also problematic. And they are not used by test-production companies that make them available for licensed mental healthcare personnel and detail the qualifications needed. Anyone can download them, even those tests that indicate they are not for clinical use.

I sat and watched a psychiatrist attempt to administer a cognition test for Alzheimer’s, and he did the one thing all of us are trained not to do. He led the patient in her responses. “You don’t know the city we’re in, do you?” was his first question. He was supposed to ask her (the list of questions was right in front of him) what city they were in, not offer that she didn’t know the name of the town.

Providing that kind of opening indicates to the patient that they are not likely to know the answer to the following questions that will be asked. It was a significant mistake, but the patient was obviously impaired and wouldn’t have gotten a good score regardless of how the task was administered. That is not the point, however. If someone is going to do psychological testing of any type, they should be adequately trained. The guidelines are online.

Intelligence testing is another area of contention, and I have seen too many psychologists administer them improperly. I recall a professor telling a student, “This is the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, not the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale with Smile.” Smiling is not permitted in the rigid protocol.

A significant example of this related to a licensed clinical psychologist who was picked up on a highway on the West Coast of the US. She had abandoned her car and was in distress. The officers took her for an evaluation to the nearest hospital. It happened to provide care for persons with mental deficiencies. They administered an IQ test at the facility, and she scored less than 50, placing her in an impaired group.

The woman had a doctorate and, after a month, someone thought to look into her background and discovered facts that immediately indicated she needed to be transferred. Once at another facility, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, treated, and returned to her home on the East Coast. It is a stunning example of testing under the wrong conditions and with a person who is not in a condition to be tested for intelligence.

Remember that no one is perfect regardless of where they went to school or work. We all make mistakes, but in medicine or healthcare, the errors can be life-threatening or result in isolation and a major restriction of liberties. Power must be used with this knowledge.

Always question authority.

The post Dementia Remains One of Our Most Serious Mysteries appeared first on Medika Life.

It’s a tip of the hat to faith healers, shamans, and witch doctors. It is also a shameful marketing ploy by medically trained professionals that should know better and it is a seriously dangerous red flashing light for the profession and its credibility.

Drugs have become our fallback for almost everything. Practitioners in general are massively guilty of doling them out as a panacea for socially compromised adults. Adults that possess no life skills or coping mechanisms are simply drugged into oblivion. You don’t need to worry about handling life if you’re too stoned to notice it. Forget therapy or actually trying to provide the necessary life skills. Too time-consuming and really, why cure when you create a lifetime of dependence? 

Medicine is slipping, quitely, intentionally and unnoticed, into a new sideline.

It is becoming the traveling quack show we so despise, prescribing drugs to treat conditions that mostly don’t exist, conditions some practitioners are unqualified to recognize, let alone prescribe for, and unfortunately, when it comes to those who are trained, the fallback (and sometimes go-to)treatment is the ever lucrative cocktail of mind-altering concoctions we now have at our disposal.

I would go so far as to say that 90% of the patients showing up cap in hand at your door aren’t suffering from any condition your medication could possibly treat, let alone cure. Forget management, if that’s where you’re going. That isn’t an out either. Someone who hasn’t been given the tools or strategies to cope with life doesn’t require medication, they need the school of life and real help to develop mechanisms many of us are already fortunate enough to possess. Medicating these patients is CRIMINAL. It is WRONG. It is UNETHICAL.

I would suggest to our modern-day mental health professionals and doctors alike, that unless you are really gullible or simply follow the flock, that you are aware of the failings in your treatment of these individuals. It’s an easy out, isn’t it? We’ve conditioned the patients to expect the pill. The miracle in the bottle, the panacea that will solve all of life’s problems.

Your patient doesn’t want any other form of help. They simply want the easy route and they’ll sit in front of you and bitch till you get out that pad and start writing. Part of you justifies it with a simplistic thought to ease your conscience. If you don’t prescribe, they’ll simply get it somewhere else. So you cave in. It’s quicker, it’s easier and at least, you think to yourself as you start writing, you can keep an eye on them.

WRONG. STOP. What you are doing is unethical. Is it in the patient’s best interest? Are you properly qualified to make that judgment? Do you understand that you are fundamentally changing the course of the person’s life sitting in front of you. Do you REALLY? Those quick, few lines on that script are potentially going to create a life of addiction and dependency. Was that why you joined the medical profession. For some doctors and many psychiatrists, it clearly seems to be.

Your flashing lights, new age mumbo jumbo, and cutting edge designer drugs are simply complex rituals you’ve designed to cover your snake oil shows. The best interests of the patient ceased being at issue years ago and the danger now, as even universities get involved in the medical mystery tour routine, is that people will start to perceive this as being real medicine. It isn’t and every effort must be made to ensure it never becomes that.

 It is a marketing farce, quackery, and pseudoscience wrapped up in what you assume to be a professional presentation to fool the public We see you. We see the lives you are destroying and you better believe we aren’t going to let it go.

It’s time to clean up your sad acts. Revert back to your core principles and HELP the patient, stop helping yourselves. Why Treat when you can Cure? By all means, assist your patients, but do so ethically. Treat them humanely and help them to address the shortcomings in their lives by providing them with lasting skills to cope with their existences. None of this involves any need to get your local pharmacist involved.

You’ll find the rewards from this difficult and lengthy process to be far more rewarding than all the time you currently spend arranging your mirrors and putting on the makeup. 

Where are your facts?

Oh, they’re coming. Don’t fret. This is simply a warning shot, fired across the bows, to encourage those with sense to pause, stop, and re-assess their current practices. Most will ignore it, but it may hopefully reach a few professionals. Medika will be publishing a few in-depth articles in the coming weeks on the disgraceful practices that are now becoming almost routine within the mental health community. Medication will feature strongly, as will the tendency to misdiagnose.

To push patients into neatly labeled boxes, each representing a different condition. Boxes that simplify everyone’s life. The patient considers his medication justified, even if the diagnosis of late-onset autism seems a little iffy. The care provider has only to continue handing out the medication and monitoring the patient. A lengthy and sometimes lifelong relationship that benefits no one, other than the practitioner.

Good doctors, ethical doctors, of whom there are many, whose sole purpose is to ensure the health of their patients, are also compromised as trust in the profession is eroded. Patients no longer view the profession with the dewy-eyed trust enjoyed by doctors fifty years ago. No one is more to blame for this than the quacks and charlatans from within the ranks of medicine itself.

That these quacks were, and are still able, in some instances, to pursue their chosen professions, speaks volumes to the lack of proper, swift, and merciless sanction from governing bodies. Lenient approaches from regulatory bodies within certain states encourage the problem and any potential solutions to eradicating this rot from the medical profession have to be undertaken with the full engagement of these bodies.

It must be eradicated. Medicine cannot afford further dilution of the trust it enjoys from the public. The consequences will be devastating, impacting vaccination rates, terminal care, and the inevitable escalating costs of trying to save those who have ventured away from traditional medicine to seek salvation in the hands of the natural healers and fraudsters that permeate the internet.

If we continue to dispense so easily, to medicate without sound reason, then we are in effect digging our own graves. You cannot magic away the problems of two generations of poorly parented adults with a pill. You see doctor, your patients aren’t ill, they are just ill-prepared.

The post Drugs are Rapidly Becoming Healthcare’s Greatest Burden appeared first on Medika Life.