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The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis
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Product Description
Dr. Peter Whitehouse will transform the way we think about Alzheimer’s disease. In this provocative and ground-breaking book he challenges the conventional wisdom about memory loss and cognitive impairment; questions the current treatment for Alzheimer’s disease; and provides a new approach to understanding and rethinking everything we thought we knew about brain aging.
The Myth of Alzheimer’s provides welcome answers to the questions that millions of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – and their families – are eager to know:
Is Alzheimer’s a disease?
What is the difference between a naturally aging brain and an Alzheimer’s brain?
How effective are the current drugs for AD? Are they worth the money we spend on them?
What kind of hope does science really have for the treatment of memory loss? And are there alternative interventions that can keep our aging bodies and minds sharp?
What promise does genomic research actually hold?
What would a world without Alzheimer’s look like, and how do we as individuals and as human communities get there?
Backed up by research, full of practical advice and information, and infused with hope, THE MYTH OF ALZHEIMER’S will liberate us from this crippling label, teach us how to best approach memory loss, and explain how to stave off some of the normal effects of aging.
Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D., one of the best known Alzheimer’s experts in the world, specializes in neurology with an interest in geriatrics and cognitive science and a focus on dementia. He is the founder of the University Alzheimer Center (now the University Memory and Aging Center) at University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University where he has held professorships in the neurology, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, organizational behavior, bioethics, cognitive science, nursing, and history. He is also currently a practicing geriatric neurologist. With his wife, Catherine, he founded The Intergenerational School, an award winning, internationally recognized public school committed to enhancing lifelong cognitive vitality.
Daniel George, MSc, is a research collaborator with Dr. Whitehouse at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Medical Anthropology at Oxford University in England.
“I don’t have a magic bullet to prevent your brain from getting older, and so I don’t claim to have the cure for AD; but I do offer a powerful therapy—a new narrative for approaching brain aging that undercuts the destructive myth we tell today. Most of our knowledge and our thinking is organized in story form, and thus stories offer us the chief means of making sense of the present, looking into the future, and planning and creating our lives. New approaches to brain aging require new stories that can move us beyond the myth of Alzheimer’s disease and towards improved quality of life for all aging persons in our society. It is in this book that your new story can begin." -Peter Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #98148 in Books
- Published on: 2008-01-08
- Released on: 2008-01-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 319 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780312368166
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
Review
“…a thought provoking book that raises important questions about later life cognitive decline and Alzheimer disease. I highly recommend it.”- Peter V. Rabins, M.D., MPH, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, co-author of The 36-Hour Day
“A landmark book. If we read Peter Whitehouse thoughtfully, we’ll never see Alzheimer’s the same way again. Agree or disagree, he has changed the way we need to think about a critical problem in our time.”- Harry R. Moody, Director of Academic Affairs, AARP
"Dr. Peter Whitehouse tackles with courageous candor current myths about "Alzheimer's disease" and offers an alternate, realistic and holistic approach to healthy and dignified aging." -Vladimir Hachinski, MD, FRCPC, DSc Distinguished University Professor University of Western Ontario University Hospital
"This book tells the story of a remarkable journey. Peter Whitehouse describes and interprets the history and meaning of Alzheimer's for our time and in doing so he makes a personal journey as a successful scientist and researcher to question and reappraise his own vales and the meaning of his work." -Harry Cayton, Chief Executive, Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, Former Chief Executive, Alzheimer's Society UK
“Bold, provocative, and compassionate. Peter Whitehouse tells the fascinating story of Alzheimer’s, and then drafts a new version: embracing the challenge of living with our changing brains, and focusing hope on community, kindness, and humanistic care. This book surely would have helped our family.”- Ann Davidson, author of Alzheimer’s: A Love Story and A Curious Kind of Widow
“The Myth of Alzheimer’s is an arresting and eminently readable book. This courageous, thoughtful book demands immediate attention.” - Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
“This book is of enormous relevance to persons concerned about and struggling with significant changes in cognitive functioning, as well as to family members, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, community program planners, and policy makers.” - Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., author of The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain
“…a penetrating critique of the concept of Alzheimer’s disease and the medical industrial complex that created it and benefits from it. [It is] a book full of profound and practical wisdom to all who are struggling to meet the cosmic and quotidian challenges of dementia.”- Jesse F. Ballenger, Ph.D., author of Self, Senility, and Alzheimer’s Disease in Modern America
“…deliberately provocative, carefully researched, and lovingly rendered.”- Anne Basting, Director, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Center on Age & Community, author of Forget Memory
“Finally, from a highly respected, vastly experienced scientist and philosopher, a sane, humane, practical, nonmedical, politically informed-- in other words, revolutionary -- way to understand and live with our aging brains. What a relief! What a treasure!”
- Judith Levine, author of Do You Remember Me?: A Father, a Daughter, and a Search for the Self
“Policy makers, physicians, researchers, lay people, must read this book.”
- Steven R. Sabat, author of The Experience of Alzheimer's Disease: Life Through a Tangled Veil
“With wisdom, honed through years of research and practice, Dr. Whitehouse opens the door to normal aging. Dr. Whitehouse has integrated medical research with practice, guiding the reader towards a wise old age.” -Naomi Feil, executive director, the Validation Training Institute, Inc.
“With an impressive fusion of scientific data and humanistic vision Peter Whitehouse and Danny George successfully challenge the dominant conception of Alzheimer’s disease. Arguing that an AD diagnosis is “scientifically unsound and socially disruptive,” they reframe the way we think, speak and act toward our aging brains and help us imagine a better future for ourselves and our communities. “ - Cathy Greenblat PhD, author of Alive with Alzheimer’s
“Get ready for the fireworks. Peter Whitehouse has fired a shot into the midst of what he calls the Alzheimer's empire - the vast network of people and organizations that collect hundreds of millions in research funds and make billions selling drugs for treating a disease that does not exist. Whitehouse brings to his topic a level of humanism that is reminiscent of Oliver Sacks' writings about patients with cognitive differences from the so-called norm.” - David B. Wolfe, author of Ageless Marketing and co-author of Firms of Endearment
“Peter Whitehouse is very well known in Japan and around the world as a caring clinician and pioneering researcher. In Japan the government and experts have changed the words for dementia (from chi ho to nin shi sho) because we are aware of the negative effects of stigmatizing labels.” - Akira Homma, Chief of Psychiatry, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and Founder of Japanese Society for Dementia Care
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When we think about myths, we usually think of timeless tales of gods, heroes, and monsters that entertain and enthrall. Since the Enlightenment, mythology has been regarded as the province of more primitive minds—something humanity has moved beyond in its embrace of scientific methodology. But has science been successful in purging contemporary civilization of all myths? I don’t believe that it has or likely ever will.
In fact, although we depend on the objectivity of science, scientifically influenced fields such as medicine are often rife with their own myths and misapprehensions. This is because, as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss1 believed, every myth—whether it be about a god hurling a lightning bolt from a mountain, a hero undertaking harrowing adventures filled with sirens, storms, and ferocious beasts, or a generation of scientists trying to fight a peculiar disease of old age—is driven by the need to address the complexities of the human condition and to try to resolve paradoxes that perplex us. In our modern age, in which remarkable scientific and technological advances have both extended and brought quality to human lives, we find major challenges to our rationality and values as science attempts to understand our own mysterious organ of rational thought—the brain—and the very processes of brain aging. From out of the depths of this paradox, a hundred-year-old monster has risen; it is called “Alzheimer’s disease.”
The myth of alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s disease represents our culture’s attempt to make sense of a natural process (brain aging) that we cannot control. Just as past civilizations posited mythical explanations for natural events they could not explain, we have created an antagonist: a terrorizing disease of the brain that our scientists are fighting against. The pillars of the myth are as follows:
AD is a singular disease
Despite widespread belief that there is a disease called Alzheimer’s against which science is waging war, what the public isn’t told is that so-called Alzheimer’s disease cannot be differentiated from normal aging and that no two illness courses are the same. As you will learn, there is no one biological profile of Alzheimer’s that is consistent from person to person, and all the biological hallmarks of AD are also the hallmarks of normal brain aging.
People “get” Alzheimer’s in old age
It seems as if more people fall victim to Alzheimer’s each year. Newspapers and magazines would have us believe that Alzheimer’s is spreading throughout human populations, and especially baby boomers, like an epidemic and claiming millions more victims.
However, what you aren’t told is that we don’t even know how to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, let alone tabulate the numbers of disease victims. Because there is no single biological profile for AD, every clinical diagnosis is considered “probable”—and, frankly speaking, not even postmortem examination can differentiate a so-called AD victim from those who have aged normally. Hence, the claim that a diagnosis of “definite” Alzheimer’s can be made after death is itself questionable. The gold standard of neuropathology is a bit tarnished. No one really ever “gets” a singular disease called Alzheimer’s, and there is no evidence that Alzheimer’s is spreading throughout the baby boomer population other than the fact that the world is aging and there are more middle-aged people at risk for brain-aging phenomena.
We can cure Alzheimer’s through the continued
investment of our public and private dollars
The myth that Alzheimer’s is a disease separate from aging also carries the promise that science will one day win the “war” against this disease. But if Alzheimer’s cannot be differentiated from normal brain aging, to cure AD we would literally have to arrest the natural process of brain aging. I am not alone in casting doubt upon this myth. As you will read, even scientists in the Alzheimer’s research field will tell you that a cure is unlikely and that we need to invest our dollars more wisely by putting them toward prevention and care rather than predominantly in cure. However, like the myth of the Fountain of Youth, which captivated past civilizations, the promise of a panacea for one of our most dreaded “diseases” is a powerful cultural myth, and one purveyed by powerful pharmaceutical companies, advocacy organizations, and private researchers with much profit to gain. It is a myth we have been seduced by, and the combination of hype and fear it inspires has distorted our expectations and understandings about our aging brains.
My Story
For nearly twenty-five years, I have served as a leader in the Alzheimer’s field, and have helped international Alzheimer’s organizations and pharmaceutical companies shape the rules, guidelines, diagnostic categories, and accepted clinical approaches to Alzheimer’s disease. My experiences and relationships with other colleagues have endowed me with some influence and power and have enabled me to become what the science community calls a “thought leader” (or KOL—“key opinion leader”)—one who guides our conventional thinking about a particular condition.
In the beginning of my career, at a time when no medicines had been approved specifically for Alzheimer’s and companies were unsure about how to proceed in drug development, the pharmaceutical industry reached out to me and listened to my thoughts and opinions about treating persons with memory challenges. Once drugs made their way to the market in the 1990s the relationship shifted. Rather than being interested in having my thoughts influence their views, it seemed as if industry wanted to change my mind and convince me that their drugs were worth giving to my patients. This focus on biological approaches to brain aging across our society has shifted the whole dynamic of the field away from caring for the aging patient and his family and toward drugs as the primary means of ensuring the quality of his life. Too often, aging patients and their families leave the doctor’s office with little more than a pill prescription (often encompassing several pills) and fear generated by the Alzheimer’s myth, knowing little about how to effectively care for the condition.
This is inhumane and inexcusable.
Now, upon the one hundredth anniversary of the first case of Alzheimer’s, I feel obliged to share my stories and the insight I have gained, to inform the general public how I—a lifelong Alzheimer’s disease researcher and clinician—have evolved to espouse a different ideological position that transforms a significant portion of what I’ve believed in as a professional carer for patients. Having spent my life within the scientific, political, economic, and social institutions of the AD field—universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies—studying and treating human aging and disease, I am ready to challenge the power that the mainstream “Alzheimer’s disease” myth has over us and help people see what I have seen and to think critically about the evolution in thought that has occurred over the past several decades, which has shaped the way we see our aging bodies and minds and the way we act toward them. I want to articulate a story of brain aging that can be a starting point for helping us better cope with and prepare for the travails of cognitive decline.
No longer can we safely assume that the march of progress in the “War against AD” is moving at the hoped for speed or direction; no longer can we maintain the mythical illusion that AD is a battle against a specific disease that we will eventually “win”; no longer can we keep looking at aging persons, however embattled, as somehow “diseased.” Defining brain aging as a disease and then trying to cure it is at its root unscientific and misguided. In short, Alzheimer’s is a hundred-year old myth that is over the hill. The entire scientific, technological, and political framework for aging needs to be reassessed to better serve patients and families in order to help people maximize their quality of life as they move along the path of cognitive aging. Copyright © 2008 by Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D., with Daniel George, M.Sc. All rights reserved.0
Customer Reviews
The Most Dreaded Disease of Our Time: Demystified
Betty Friedan helped change our thoughts and language about gender relations. Martin Luther King, Jr. helped change our thoughts and language about racial relations. Now Dr. Peter Whitehouse is helping change our thoughts and language about aging - more particularly about our aging brains. And this is a very good time for another social revolution in thought and language. Seventy-eight million Baby Boomers are reaching a time in life when brain changes due to aging are inevitable and, with enough time passing, universal.
The language we use to describe the inevitabilities of cognitive aging tap into the deepest reservoirs of fear: senior moments, dementia, loss of self, and organic brain dysfunction. In particular, we think of two words with unspoken angst: Alzheimer's disease.
In "The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis," Dr. Whitehouse and his young literary protégé, Daniel George, address the very foundation of our cultural and social relationships to the most dreaded disease of modern times. First described in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer, this disease has grown into a "$100-billion-a-year marketing and research juggernaut, with more than 25 million afflicted worldwide." The victims of this mysterious milady face ostracism, institutionalization, isolation, loneliness and dependency. The perpetrators of the Myths are comfortable with our collective fears because they inspire research budgets, drug sales, elaborate diagnostic testing protocols, and nicely decorated prison facilities.
Above all, the Myths perpetrators create another class of human being, the unfortunate mortals who are less-than-fully human because of diminishing memories, communication skills and competencies with the activities of daily living. They are dying brains without hearts.
To most of us, such a medical diagnosis is a decree worse than death itself. It is what we dread for our parents; it is what we fear for ourselves. The authors believe the time has come to change our language and our innate conceptions of cognitive aging
With more than 30 years of experience as a scientist and geriatric neurologist, Dr. Whitehouse has been at the forefront of the evolution of the disease we call Alzheimer's. He has earned over a million dollars consulting with pharmaceutical companies about development of cholinesterase inhibitors, the contemporary silver bullets in drug therapies for early treatment of disease symptoms. He has accepted grants to support research and education in service of the same industry, valued at millions of more dollars. He has traveled the world to discuss the marvels of the coming cognitive pharmacopeia, again a benefactor of drug industry dollars.
And, finally, he has set in motion a pugnacious call for sensibility and a more informed public. As he portends, "(the book) is at root a book for Baby Boomers and health care professionals, and anyone else who wants to join me in bringing a new understanding to Alzheimer's disease and taking control of their own brain aging."
Taking control is a clarion call for the Boomer generation. Taking control is our legacy, and at exactly the right moment in the trajectory of our lives, Peter Whitehouse passionately compels us to take control of the source of our humanity, our creativity, our intellect, our personhood ... our brains. He suggests we have choices if we have knowledge and wisdom. He suggests we have dignity if we change our paradigms. He suggests we have the power to change what it means to be human across the entire lifespan, up to and including the twilight years when some of us inevitably will confront the challenges of cognitive decline. He suggests we no longer need passively to resign to medicine's most fearsome diagnosis, for either ourselves or those we love. He tells us we can deconstruct Alzheimer's and together create a more humanistic, healthy and hopeful view of brain aging. That can be our generation's final legacy.
To help us get from here to there (by overcoming the tyranny of AD), the authors have written a new narrative about brain aging. By employing the transformative power of stories and anecdotes, buttressed by the precision of hard science, they take readers through a fascinating journey.
Unabashedly they stare down the mythmakers. AD is not a brain disease or a mental illness; symptoms we associate with AD are not simply a brain's molecular breakdown occurring in old age but more often "a rainstorm that occurs throughout life." A new conception demands this cluster of cognitive changes to become both an individual's and humanity's long-term responsibility, from personal health choices to taking care of the planet that sustains and, because of environmental degradation, poisons us.
Dr. Whitehouse challenges us that AD does not lead to loss of self, as we might have envisioned the plight of President Ronald Reagan; rather, persons with cognitive impairment are still able to be vital contributors to society until the final days of life. By evoking new paradigms about brain aging, we can allow people the noble opportunities to continue contributing. For example, Dr. Whitehouse is also a founder with his wife of The Intergenerational School, a farsighted institution that brings children together with wise teachers who are great repositories of life's most important lessons.
If this book simply accomplished the objective of "creating a new cultural narrative that can shape the way we age in the twenty-first century," it would be an important work worthy of careful review and contemplation. But the good doctor and his protégé take their work even further by creating a new model of living with brain aging. Dr Whitehouse unveils everything we need to understand, from preparing for a doctor's visit to knowing how to live successfully with aging across the human lifespan.
So, in the end, he teaches readers how to "think like a mountain." For example, Boomers can climb the first peak by rethinking mortality. Instead of elevating "anti-aging" as the highest purpose for our credit cards, Dr. Whitehouse suggests that the energy (both psychic and monetary) for self-preservation can instead be directed at "becoming agents of great change in the world," the final expression of Boomers' highest aspirations in youth. Another peak to scale is self-indulgence that costs our health. So simply he suggests eating well, exercising judiciously and eliminating bad habits that foster disease.
This seminal book isn't just about Alzheimer's or the Myths that infuse the disease with too much power over our collective consciousness; it is the most intelligent work thus far about our generation's final crusade, the quest for wisdom in our longevity.
Great read for the entire medical community
The Myth of Alzheimer's is not only relevant to people who have the potential of one day being wrongfully diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (which already includes everybody) but also to people interested in the medical community.
As a field, medicine is commonly criticized for lacking empathy with our patients that we usually treat like customers. Medicine also seem to lack accountability (only when major mistakes are made do physicians get supervision). Furthermore it seems that medicine has forgot to create its own limits (check the price of the medication you are on).
As a medical student, I believe that this criticism is founded. In medical school are taught all day every day, pure simple and elegant facts. We are given an explanation about those facts and we are then expected to go on practicing without ever asking questions. Thus we are never taught to have accountability. Exactly zero second is spent in the vast majority of medical schools on the price of health care thus physicians have no sense of limits. Finally our competitive process weeds out most people with any kind of empathy.
In his book Dr. Whitehouse shows a great example of how to think outside the box, how to see the mistakes that medicine has made, and the process which has lead to the largest myth of our generation: the Myth of Alzheimer's.
The success of this book will not only be seen in how many people start asking questions about the facts of Alzheimer but also by the way the medical community decides to reexamine itself and hopefully start showing more: Empathy, Accountability, and self-Limitation.
You'll Never Look at Alzheimer's the Same Again!
Call it political correctness. Call it academic pressure. Call it whatever you wish, but understand that there is pressure, both subtle and overt, to follow only the conventional medical model where Alzheimer's is concerned. This model decrees that cure in the form of a pill or other medical device is the only solution to the problems of the aging brain. Huge amounts of money flow to that end.
In The Myth of Alzheimer's, authors Whitehouse and George ask you to understand that:
· what we are routinely told is not the whole truth about Alzheimer's disease,
· there is no universal agreement on the cause or cure for the symptoms of Alzheimer's in brain or behavior, and
· a billion-dollar industry relies on the perpetuation of the myth of Alzheimer's.
Heresy, pure and simple.
If the author were less well educated or experienced, we could burn him at the stake or, at the very least, denigrate his notions as those of a far-out kook. But as it is, we must regard his observations as having some degree of credibility.
Whitehouse and George devote a chapter to the billion-dollar industry that has grown up around Alzheimer's disease, especially to those associations and foundations that have benefited richly from contributions.
Of course, it's not only associations and foundations that focus so little on assistance and prevention and so much on a "cure" that has failed to materialize. Governmental bodies and pharmaceutical companies currently operate big budgets to fund hundreds of studies searching for the "cure" or symptom amelioration. Of those only about two percent focus on prevention.
The Myth of Alzheimer's is the right book at the right time. More and more people are turning away from conventional medicine, partly because its cost has skyrocketed, partly because its "promises" have failed to materialize or damaged those who trusted it. The ideas this book presents will help both the aging and their caregivers gain maximum comfort at minimal cost and reduced risk.
This is a uniquely important book. Read it. Learn about the theories of causation. Learn how your approach affects sufferers. Allow it to open your mind to new ways of thinking about and dealing with the syndrome known as Alzheimer's disease.
Thank you, Dr. Whitehouse, for presenting an extraordinary alternate view that encourages people to take responsibility for their own aging, their own health.
