This quote stuck out to me: But as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
I’ve seen his warning play out time and time again in the medical field, where experts cannot say certain things for fear of upsetting the powers that be.
We need more scientists like Begley that are willing to go against their peers and suggest that some of their ideas are wrong.
And more scientists and physicians who courageously issued and supported the Great Barrington Declaration and who suffered the opprobrium and scorn of the DNC and their media handmaidens and their legions of dupes, many of whom screeched loudly on these pages.
you bray like a jackass from the Alex Jonex/Koch Bros troll farm, just like the jackasses on the "left" bray cheap, meaningless [, toxic] slogans from the Soros troll farm.
your narratives all follow the same structure: idiotic propaganda, paranoia and circular reasoning.
you should be profoundly embarrassed by your absurd lies, but since you are a narcissistic sociopath (or a troll-b0t imitating a sociopath), you aren't.
And yet they continue to smack us with this trash over and over again. The Covid lockdowns were a case in point, there was no science there was fear and panic, and yet 21/2 years later the powers that be are still smacking us with the same BS it beggars belief at times!
You have a point, if it’s not your iPhone it’s your iPad, if not those two, its cable, for recreation it’s Netflix they are where we live and eat we need to get them out of lives, the deep state is brainwashing it’s very scary.
I think these problems also reflect the Green Religion science. There are far too careers invested in the 'peer reviewed' theory that humans have contributed, to some degree, to climate change, and what, if anything, can be done to reverse it.
My father developed Alzheimer's at the same time as the author's and died after eight years. His father did as well. Needless to say I've always donated generously to Alzheimer's societies hoping for a cure before I suffered the same fate, but can see I was just pissing my money away.
Another thing to remember when the Left references 'settled science'.
I couldn't help but notice the similarity to the research into our changing climate as I read this sad tale of bureaucratic group think and the profound effect that such rigidity to a theory can have on research.
This is an inheritable disease. I hope that you have not bred and continued the problem. We are no better than other animals, many of whom we breed for superiority. German Shepherds suffer from hip displasia. We suffer from much worse.
Chances are you're simply trolling, but in the event anyone actually takes you seriously, yes, I believe there is a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer's, but there is also for many cardiac, orthopedic and other disorders, and they've come up with treatments and therapies to deal with them.
Grotesque comment. There is probably a genetic component to Alzheimer’s but it’s not 100%, doesn’t arise until very late in life, and shouldn’t preclude having children in any case. You sound like a eugenicist.
There is nothing wrong with being a eugenicist when it serves the purpose of screening for debilitating diseases that bankrupt families and could be avoided with screening and therapeutic abortion. I wonder how many people are dealing with the care of drooling idiots and succoring themselves with the chant, "It's God's will" or something else like that.
There is a difference between what they did and using modern science to keep people from breeding their obviously inferior genes. Time to stop bringing up that tired, emotional, and untrue example to keep those of us who shouldn't breed breeding. They were killing groups of people just to kill them. There is no comparison, even if you want one.
Alzheimer's develops relatively late in life. Is it horrible? Yes. But your stance would have robbed us of people who accomplished spectacular things before the disease struck. President Reagan comes immediately to mind. I'm sure there are legions of others that research would uncover. Not to mention the many people who were simply kind, loving and supportive parents and friends. You are perfectly entitled to refrain from passing on your genes. But your nostrum would have robbed the world of some very talented and gifted people who gave much to society.
Your opinion. Mine differs. I don't think we're smart enough to know what genes are good and what are bad necessarily. Look at all the British and American eugenics ideas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
You cite information that is over 100 years old. Things have moved light years beyond them. What HASN'T changed is the fact that we are no different than any other carbon unit, flora or fauna. I say this as one who is a product of a family that has a history of cancer. I live with a Damocles sword over my head and thankfully I have no children to whom I will pass it on. Knowing that, were I to have had children, how is that any different than abusing them???? Just a matter of degree.
Oh, and in every example you cite, those disorders were easily fixed with lifestyle changes and exercise, as well as x-rays which could see the problems. There is no comparison.
In fact, exercise HAS been proven to help prevent AD. Controlling hypertension is another. Smoking cessation is yet another. There are more. We just need doctors to address these issues before the onset of symptoms instead of trying to treat a disease with medicines that actually do nothing. Not everyone with "Alzheimers gene" gets Alzheimer's. And many who have Alzheimer's don't carry the gene. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31964800/
Check out Dr. Richard Isaacson's work. Here is a link to his interview on a podcast I subscribe to. Or you could just google him. He is at the forefront of preventative medicine for Alzheimer's.
Most of us are not bred to please someone's idea of an aesthetic, including yours.
We are naturally attracted to find a mate and reproduce, regardless of our genetic "defects". If Alzheimer's were subject to natural selection, then nature would take care of it. Old age is not a genetic defect, it's a necessity of life, and he debilitation that comes with old age takes many forms, some of which can be treated in a humane way.
Surely you don't object to treating humans humanely?
Why do you presume that I would not want to treat ANY sentient being less than humanely? How is it humane, however, to increase lifespans to the point where dementia and related diseases are almost inevitable? Keeping individuals staggering around or even worse, warehoused in so-called "retirement" centers while their last dollars are siphoned out of the bank, is hardly humane. Many of those centers are constantly shorthanded and the residents are often left to fester in their own waste products for hours. Yeah, humane my ass.
Well, you did write you would prefer they be aborted, and never have a chance to live. That does not sound humane to me. Some of the most debilitated people I know prefer life as they are over never having lived.
100 years ago most people did not live long enough to become demented. We are so humane that we have found ways for people to live longer and more productive lives. The trade off is that we have more people with old age related disease. For most of us, having grandparents around longer is preferable to having them die young. Most Grandparents also want to watch their Grandchildren grow up. It's probably the biggest reward in life, regardless of how disabled one becomes.
Not so long ago, families lived together with grandparents as a family unit. I agree that sending to the nursing home has had a negative effect on society. So we agree on something. Like abortion, it has been done mostly out of convenience, but it is still better than casting them out in the street to die or suffer. They do get better medical care than most families can provide in the home.
We live in an age of developing gene therapies. We have RNAi vectors for gene suppression under development, and I have been personally involved with cell-type-specific vectors. That combination should unleash fantastic power and control over our genetic inheritances.
We are an inventive lot. We had better be, because most of us have at least one deleterious gene. We could fix our inherited components, which sounds far more appealing to me than eugenics.
I love science and tech, but you have more faith than I in the scientists involved in the pharmaceutical business.
How smart is it to practice gain of function in the middle of a crowded city? Today it's still being done in Wuhan and other insecure locations. War torn Ukraine has Pharma labs practicing gain of function.
So tell me again how smart are these scientists? Science does not require trust, it is a process and not a person. Many scientists today have proven themselves unworthy if trust, especially those in the high profit pharmaceutical businesses. Medical science is more of a "soft science" and is often wrong. Why else would your doctor recommend a second "opinion"? Because it's more opinion than hard science.
We actually paid them billions for an ineffective clean up of their own global man made environmental disaster. Over 5 million dead and every human damaged in some way, and yet they are treated as heroes?
Forgive me for not replying for so very long. You have made many good points regarding the advertised moral worth vs the actual morality of scientists in general. I earned my PhD at a corrupt institution, and was forcibly redirected from fiscally promising research after dedicating years to it in an effort by others to try to insulate a tenured prof from the legal consequences of his actions. I also personally intervened and halted an (accidental) gain-of-function project by my then-colleagues, who were oblivious to the dangers it posed. Doing so won me stunned admiration but no friends, but I sleep well at night knowing that I helped prevent a different COVID-level incident more than two decades before the one you wrote about.
Knowledge is power. Some get drunk on it. Others use it in "sheepdog" fashion, and risk much to prevent the worst things from happening. I knew the late 1990's papers on Ad5 vectors were hiding something (dangerous immunogenicity), and proposed a fix (site-directed peglyation) as the project for advanced standing for my Doctorate. How I wish I could have followed up on it in a timely manner and saved a few lives (and an emerging industry!!) There is much, much more I could add here.
While it is true that our leadership is often morally bankrupt, there are still those who work towards moral outcomes.
"experts cannot say certain things for fear of upsetting the powers that be." I think this is how we came to the Trans Takeover of Medicine including "Gender Affirming Care". What is more shocking is that no mainstream journalists want to practice real journalism for the same reasons.
NPR is among the worst. It would be nice if Joanne or someone would speak to her colleagues about one sided reporting and major omissions of facts.
"On October 6th, I listened to Melissa Block on NPR report that “Courts have blocked a number of the anti-LGBTQ laws from going into effect” and, as usual with NPR’s reporting on this issue, my blood began to boil. From start to finish, the gender ideology movement turns language upside down and NPR, amongst many others, including journalists, is fully participating in the lies to support the trans movement’s agenda. In order to win and save our children we must retake language. I will start."
"Have you heard the latest headlines out of the U.K, that the National Health Service has ended “gender-affirming care” and replaced it with “holistic and appropriate” care? This is huge news—and a huge departure from the way it’s been for the last decade—and the way it continues to be in the US. Maybe you should study the Cass review that concluded that gender affirming care provides very low evidence.
So, why is this not being reported? Why instead are Americans being subjected to breathless news reports about trans influencers getting cookies from Biden in the White House, touting Biden’s diehard support of trans-everything?"
Yes, I kept thinking, "Boy isn't that pot calling the kettle black!" after reading that she worked for NPR. She only recognizes the problem when it strikes close to home. I wonder if it will change her at all? Will she be able to see it working in other areas in the future?
So, it is possible (1000% speculation) that NPR refused to let her report on the problems with Alzheirmer's drugs, so she left NPR (but still retains some loyalty and thus isn't dishing the dirt).
There was a recent TikTok posted by a girl w/her uterus in a glass jar complete w/a little illuminating light to set it on for display. Look she said 'there's my cervix'. In another TikTok a young man/woman (couldn't tell by looking) who had gone through 'gender affirming' care was holding a literal hand basket full of pills pleading that others not make the mistake saying "I hate my life -I hate it'. -------- Can American horror get any deeper? Yes.
Cancer was mentioned in the article as being more advanced in therapies than Alzheimer's. As I am no doctor I stand to be corrected, but as the quote alludes, it is the reality on the ground that matters. Immune therapies are all the rage in cancer care now, but it took seventy years of repeated failures from the standard approach of radiology and chemotherapy to enable an alternative approach to emerge. And only then were dissenting voices finally heard.
The reality of failure and disappointment, if repeated enough, does concentrate the mind and force a different approach. Even pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment will have to acknowledge that, eventually.
Perhaps when the standard theory to Alzheimers therapy is met by such pronounced and long term failure, we will see an alternative arise since the research establishment will be obligated to change course. We're just not there yet. Soon, hopefully.
We keep just treating the symptoms, or just cut off the body part that is diseased. Most treatements for disease just help us survive, not thrive. The root of the problem is our lifestyle, and the poisons in our enviroment, including the chemicals in processed foods. Alzheirmers start decades before we show symptoms. No one seems to ask why there is so much Alzheimers, Autism, type 2 diabetes, cancer, etc. Well they do, but they are silenced or ignored. But the treatments are a cash cow for the medical system.
Necessity forced it upon me. A family member suffered from a proteinopathy that was to claim her life. But before it did, I determined to find an alternative. There is one, but it may need work yet. I (and others) believe the root cause is free radicals in the form of free electrons damaging proteins that distort as a result, lose function and become resistant to clearance.The two parts of the approach are to 1.) Reduce the effect of the source by ingesting a redox dye, methylene blue, and 2.) Deliberately trigger the Autophagy system with drugs that are already FDA approved. They do exist; see Nature Chemical Biology "Novel targets for Huntington’s disease in an mTOR independent autophagy pathway" Andrea Williams was the primary author; David Rubinsztein ran the laboratory. 2008 was the year, but I had an online version without the proper reference. My apologies!
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
While Feynman's genius was in itself something unusual even in a field of genius, it's his characteristic courage combined with his unusual genius which made him so important and so very rare.
Science education has been failing across many of its varied disciplines The proper place to address these scandalous stories is in the places where scientists of all disciplines begin and conclude their studies. There are precious few like Richard Feynman; but anyone can--and ought to--learn from his examples. We are suffering needless harms because so many have not.
"If we keep clearly before our minds that our theories are our own work; that we are fallible; and that our theories reflect our fallibility, then we shall doubt whether general features of our theories, such as their simplicity, or their prima facie deterministic character, correspond to features of the real world."
--- Karl Popper, pp. 42-43, "The Open Universe", (1982), Hutchinson & Co. publishers, London.
I’m re-reading The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. It’s a timely reminder of the catastrophic power of bureaucratic manipulation to divert funding, blight reputations, and destroy careers. The public is left bewildered, wondering why things don’t work. Whether or not there’s a single Robert Moses-like (or Anthony Fauci-like) figure at the top of the Alzheimer’s research ecology, the symptoms are clear. The myriads of researchers arrange themselves like iron filings around a magnet, eager for funding and promotion, and terrified of retaliation. And the public is bewildered, mourning their sick loved ones, wondering why the Alzheimer’s research process doesn’t work.
I have read The Power Broker. I was also reminded of a seminal book, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. The group think is a manifestation of a paradigm, i.e., a way of thinking. The plaque paradigm seemingly prevents alternative way of thinking and thereby limits research and careers. This is often the way science is done. It takes brave souls to break the paradigm.
Yes, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions offers an extremely relevant diagnosis of what has gone wrong with so much of modern pharmaceutical research.
Kuhn demonstrates that the great scientific revolutions were triggered by paradigm-breakers who were creative, visionary thinkers. They were (and are) intellectually courageous and often mystical in temperament, more like artists than (average) scientists.
Not surprisingly, this mentality is the opposite of the brute-force, massively-scaled, lavishly funded group-think approach to contemporary scientific research, especially pharmaceutical research, in which hundreds if not thousands of compounds are tested to see what might work. That approach works great when the fundamental science is understood (often, thanks to an earlier visionary).
But when the existing scientific paradigm is wrong, the current approach to scientific research produces only a vast waste of resources—time and money—and the cruel thwarting of the hopes of sick patients and their loved ones.
For those who have not read it, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn is one of the five best books I have read -- and that is a high bar. Dry as all get out, but the ideas about how change actually comes about are brilliant and correct far beyond just science.
If you have not read it and you are a thinking, involved person, run out and do so. You will not regret it.
Kuhn's book is the best remembered book of all the books I read in high school. If my recollection is good Kuhn asserted that old paradigms, like the amyloid-beta hypothesis, die with the death of their adherents. Kuhn's assertions predated the internet.
I agree with other commentators that the work of Dale Bredesen and The End of Alzheimer's is a worthwhile read.
I believe it was like that with modern physics and cosmology too: a generation had to die out before anyone took the new advances seriously. Of course, if this is true, it doesn't bode well for the many current controversies over the failure of dominant paradigms.
It is an eclectic mix: L'Etranger by Camus, Please Understand Me by Kiersey/Bates, 1984 by Orwell, and The Trial by Kafka. These are all books that have changed the way I look at the world in a significant fashion not only when I read them but, pretty much, permanently.
There are lots of others, but these and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions make up my top five.
I have read those. Another book that has had great impact on my life is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The journey vs the destination.
There's irony in citing approvingly Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (SoSR) from a pro-Silberner point of view, which I decidedly share. I believe it's fair to say that Professor Selkoe is a confirmed disciple of the Kuhnian view. It's fine, of course, to read Kuhn's SoSR but a great mistake to stop there. An extensive philosophical debate went on between Kuhn and another philosopher of science, Karl R. Popper. Those advocates of Kuhn's views should, if they have not already done so, read Popper's "Poverty of Historicism" and "The Logic of Scientific Discovery".
Wikipedia has a page devoted to the "Kuhn-Popper debate".
I agree. Both of the Popper books you mentioned are on my shelf...but I am a bibliophile and have found many books with which I have difficulty parting. The thing that so impacted me with SoSR was how applicable it is to virtually any part of life. We are watching it play out in so many areas now -- some science and some scientism and some just social -- but one can almost predict what the revolution will be...then it is just a matter of timing it. (If I were better at the timing, I suppose I would play the stock market...lol.)
This is why picking "Top Five" is so hard -- there are really a top 500 when you think about it.
In each case, from one point of view and an opposing view, Kuhn and Popper were engaged in a polemic not about what"scientific inquiry" "is" but what it ought to be, how it ought to be pursued--the basic informing philosophy which practitioners of science ought to adopt.
Kuhn's SoSR, while still part of my library, is nowhere near my top five or top "anything."
As for the market, indeed, you could do that. This would be an excellent time to dump any shares of Biogen.
Yes indeed. I know a physician scientist who has developed an effective non-pharma therapy for treating certain neurocognitive disorders, and he is being mocked, disparaged, and shunned by the academic cabal. Soon it will be recognized as effective, and the cabal will just move on and not apologize for anything.
He is. And, sure, Moses was a master manipulator and power broker, but let's not forget all the good he did and the lives he improved with treasures such as Jones Beach an the bridges, tunnels and highways such as the LI parkways. Not all of his projects were wrong headed.
That’s kind of the point: Caro demonstrates how Moses’s early successes on then-sparsely-populated Long Island gave him the popularity and power to exercise the same autocratic (and often illegal) methods on densely populated Manhattan, with tragic and irreversible results. He started out as an idealist, certainly, and initially did much good for the public, but he became a tyrannical monster who had to be stopped. Some day we may find that Fauci’s career followed a similar trajectory.
We could debate this endlessly. I don't see Moses as a monster, just a man who did a lot of good but fell victim to the absolute power paradigm. And given that Westway was never built, I'm not sure that what Moses did in Manhattan was "tragic and irreversible." And the list of improvements he made to the city and its quality of life are impressive and long.
What you write is, of course, true. Perhaps we should agree to disagree. But he needlessly destroyed Sunset Park in Brooklyn and he had other ambitions that were thankfully unrealized. He also destroyed the careers of scores, if not hundreds, of outstanding men and practiced McCarthyism before McCarthy. You may want to re-read the chapters dealing with the mid- to late-30s. They're not pretty.
Like Caro's study of Robert Moses, another, and more general treatment of this social phenomenon of group-think in its hyper-rationalist variety (Loyola, Richelieu & others), is John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West" (1992).
We remain stuck in that dictatorship and, if anything, matters have considerably worsened since Saul wrote that brilliant essay.
My father died of Alzheimer's and my sister was diagnosed with Early Onset at the age of 58 in October 2021. This article points out very well how the medical, pharma, and governmental agencies are captured and are driven by money and not results. Billions of dollars wasted. I encourage anyone with concerns about themselves or their loved ones to check out Dr. Dale Bredesen's work. The End of Alzheimer's Program. His method involves addressing the many underlying issues that may be causing the brain to decline. Diet, toxins, gut health, parasites, and many others. Not a magic bullet like a drug, but there are people seeing improvements. I'm praying my sister is one of them.
Yes, diet and toxins primarily, both affecting gut health, parasites, inflammation, etc.
My mother is in a fog of dementia right now. She had spent over 20 years taking statins to reduce cholesterol. She never questioned her doctor or tried to reduce cholesterol through changing her diet.
Even worse, about 10 years ago she got lazy with cooking and discovered prepared foods - breaded and deep-fried (in trans fats) meats and starches. The only fresh things she ate was cucumbers and apples.
When the pandemic hit and going to the grocery store became onerous, I started feeding her. I bought her frozen dinners that had lean meats, lots of vegetables and minimal starches. Unfortunately, her mental decline by that point was too great, and the social isolation and loss of routines erased any improvement. I moved her into my house 3 months ago because she could no longer live on her own.
Statins, I believe, are a major cause of cognitive decline, but what's even worse is the attitude that pills are the answer to an atrocious diet. Both the doctors and their patients are to blame.
Thank you, Jim. I read a long time ago that cholesterol was an important component of the brain. So I thought that a drug that reduced cholesterol would not discriminate between types and locations of cholesterol in the body.
Even 20 years ago, some medical researchers were voicing concerns about statins causing cognitive impairment. Then 5 years ago, a friend of mine (a psychiatrist who specializes in geriatric dementia) self-funded a study to see if statins caused cognitive decline. She tested 6 different statins, and found that 5 of them were detrimental, two of them seriously. The one outlier actually improved cognitive function.
My friend has not been able to publish her study or even discuss the results. Journals, which are heavily funded by pharma companies, didn't even want to review it, and the hospital where she works told her not to mention it. But when I was trying to sort through my mom's numerous pills, I asked her what she knew about statins and dementia, and she told me what I wrote above. My mother had been taking one of the worst offenders.
I had an atypical negative reaction to the statin that was prescribed for me in my mid 30s: double vision and episodes of light-headedness. So I have rejecting taking any since then.
I've tried a number of "natural" meds, including high doses of purified krill oil, without my numbers budging in the slightest. I had a full cardiovascular workup a few years when I was experiencing some mild angina on climbing stairs, and everything is clear and healthy in there, despite at least two decades of untreated (and untreatable) slightly high cholesterol. Evidently my body prefers it that way, regardless of what "research" says.
I am currently taking a statin (and two other drugs for cholesterol in small doses. I also have two copies of the APIO E4 gene that apparently predisposes me to Alzheimers. Is there any way I could get my eyes on your friend's study, while I still have sufficient wits to read it?
Here is an interesting viewpoint on the subject of cholesterol lowering meds and AD by a physician. He points out that statins that are lipophilic (Zocor and Lipitor) can cross the blood brain barrier and lower cholesterol levels in the brain, while those that are hydrophilic (Crestor and Pravachol) do not. That may be the reason for the differences in the drugs tested in the above paper. He discusses the two synthetic pathways of cholesterol in the body. One is more prominent in the brain-the product of which is desmosterol. Desmosterol levels tend to be low in AD patients. It can be measured in your blood and is reflective of desmosterol in your brain and can be tracked over time, with the desired level being at least 1.0 mg/L.
The problem is not many physicians are tuned in to preventative medicine when it comes to AD. Someone has already mentioned Dale Bredesen. I would encourage you to google Richard Isaacson, as well. He was at Cornell but has recently moved to Florida Atlantic and set up a new clinic. There needs to be more clinics like this! Wait times are staggering.
We learned the words" alzheimers disease "back in 1978. Not a household phrase then. In fact for awhile it was a staple for jokes on late night TV. No one is laughing now
Dale Bredesen, a neurologist/researcher in San Diego published a book about 5 years ago called The End of Alzheimer's in which he details how he has been able to CURE Alzheimer's in close to 80% of cases in his clinic, using his individually-tailored approach. He has only been able to do studies on small cohorts of patients because no one is willing to fund his apparently successful approach since it doesn't involve the use of potentially blockbuster drugs. Instead involves the application of fairly simple, not terribly expensive, but highly effective treatments. He has observed that Alzheimer's is mostly caused by inflammation, lack of what he calls "trophic factors" such as hormone, vitamin and other biochemical deficiencies, and toxic exposures. His approach involves reducing inflammation, replacement of deficient trophic factors, and detoxification. He present numerous cases in his book of fairly advanced cases of Alzheimer's which recovered fully under his care. There are still about 20% of patients he is unable to help with his methods, so there is clearly something missing from his analysis, but his results of approximately 80% recovery are astounding to me. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Alzheimer's disease or dementia more generally.
My mother passed away from a very aggressive form of early onset dementia and my father in law is currently suffering. I read Dr. Bredesen's book as well - fascinating. I found out about his work after listening to him interviewed on the Found My Fitness podcast. For anyone who has someone suffering from this disease I'd strongly recommend listening. Neither the book or the podcast offer a silver bullet, but do offer a preventative approach - which seems to be lacking. I have incorporated some of what I have learned into my lifestyle. Given the tone and thoroughness of the article I was surprised Dr. Bredesen wasn't mentioned. Perhaps it is another example of suppression and keeping him from having a voice.
I was just about to post about this groundbreaking book. There are many Md's and functional medicine practitioners trained in this protocol and treating thousands of people. It won't make anyone billions of dollars, but the success rate beats anything by far that the pharmaceutical companies have produced.
Agree. Dr Brednesen likens the approach to plugging all 36 holes of a roof. Hence, his multifactorial treatment approach. Not JUST the Amyloid hypothesis. See his list of 36 mechanisms from his book, The End of Alzheimers. Some patients have shown remarkable cognitive improvement.
My mother has AD. We took her to a practitioner who administers the Bredesen protocol. There are a few problems that keep it from becoming mainstream. One is that it is intense as far as the amount of lab work and frequent assessments, most of which are not covered by insurance. The diet restrictions were too detailed for my mother to follow, not to mention she couldn’t understand how/ did not believe that this might help her. It requires many supplements, which can be quite expensive. We couldn’t get my mother to take them. She was to far along to see the benefit.
Even though it is far more complicated than just taking a magic pill, it is the best answer we have. Richard Isaacson is another physician who has a preventative protocol for AD. We need more of these trailblazing doctors, who are willing to invest the kind of time it takes to tackle the disease before it takes hold.
I had a similar road with my Mom. I hear you. Wishing you and your family the best. And hoping the trailblazers refine the work and make it easier even in more advanced cases.
Apparently we didn’t watch the recent destruction of effective treatments for another disease in spite of hundreds of positive peer reviewed studies and entire regions that saw swift resolution to huge numbers of cases.
Nothing new at all.
By that time even the dullest wit could see that every news outlet was using the same phrases, reporting on the same stories, at the same instant , and were clearly being told what to report. Had been for years. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to find it here in this other medical story, it’s been going on in that field for decades.
The word disinformation is such a specialized piece of jargon… how did it suddenly spring into everyday vocabulary?
Anytime you hear every voice shouting the same thing you’re either at a concert or you’re being drowned in propaganda. And when there’s a big story yet every voice falls silent, you’re being drowned in it again. ahh dintcha know??
Never forget that if we were in the 1700s or 1800s and we had the same news outlets, they would call anyone questioning the efficacy of bleeding or mercury treatments a "spreader of disinformation." These robotic dupes should be treated like the fools they are. Cheerleaders for stupidity. Nothing more.
Considering all the horrible effects of "best practice" medicine over the centuries, you would think that the medical profession should have a bit more humility and hesitation about "orthodox" medicine. I have met only a tiny number of doctors over the years who had that humility. Too many of them believe themselves to be gods.
How about a company which leaks a noxious substance in a major metropolis and then charges the public to clean it up?
Big oil? No, big pharma. How intelligent is it to create novel viruses in the midst of a crowded metropolis. Unlike an oil spill, this spill propogated to every corner of the planet. Even wild animals are suffering.
How do they avoid prosecution? They become heroes, saving the day with "free" vaccines that did not work, and made billions in profit with zero liability for damages.
They may have escaped liability for the vaccine, but they have not escaped liability for their careless research.
Keep in mind that big pharma is the biggest sponsor of nightly news and of politicians, so expect no help from them.
Only a grass roots movement will bring justice for this horrific crime. 6 million dead and everyone on the planet damaged physically and/or financially.
The quietest tragedy I have ever seen.
What happened to liberals? They once hated big corporations, now they follow them like lambs. This should cross party lines.
When does the grass movement start? Please keep FP posted, there are a lot of us here who are right next to and right behind you. America is tired of the lying, cheating and diabolical behavior of our leadership and politicians. Please don’t expect liberals to help or Democrats to do anything both are the cause of all our problems we must really this time come 2024 vote them out.
Why do I trust government with my vote when they don't even trust me with a receipt. My bank gives me a receipt. I can check my balance online. I can make deposits from anywhere in the world without them getting lost in the mail. Instant results and 100% secure. Auditable.
There are secure, auditable ways to hold elections using tried and true methods. Someone does not want secure elections. See my Substack article entitled "Doubt Relief" for one example.
GG you know how I am fighting back I’m voting with my feet I don’t buy corporations anymore no more Coke,Nike,Adidas, definitely no Disney don’t do any FB and have shut the MSM out of my house.I have been shopping and doing coffee locally in my community I have gotten back into my Temple listening to some really good sermons and I can tell you my sprits have perked up a bit, 2023 doesn’t look so gloomy anymore😃
Yip me to since the lockdowns I have done away with my cable. Been much healthy for my family the next move is probably Netflix not enjoying like I use to
Going to read your Substack today thank you for info, and YES I agree the vote is rigged big time. Covid was the perfect storm for the Democrats to cement the rig which they duly did. But we got to fight back GG.
The stubbornness of humans and science is confounding. Take todays insane fealty to battery powered vehicles. The list of production problems and availability is well known. Rare metals needed means massive new strip mining. China controlling a plethora of those rare earth metals. Nobody wants to recycle those batteries. It is expensive, hard and unclean. With the Avg. price of an EV at $62,000 most people cannot afford to buy or lease. When the lease ends, who is going to buy a used one that may need battery replacement. Winter weather degrades efficiency. Who is going to pay for chargers at 100 unit apartment buildings? You going to have wires laying on ground from each apartment? CA told EV owners not charge their vehicles during peak hours. It will take years to switch over to alll EV’s of our 275 million registered transportation fleet. Fuel Cells are better tech, you could use existing infrastructure. Why don’t we? Because the activist nuts that have taken over the Democrat Party hate anything to do with the oil and gas industry. We could have switched our transportation fleet to natural gas decades ago. Reduced CO2 by 30%. But Nooooo. It supported the oil and gas industry. It is the same thinking that got us the worst environmental program that costs us billions. Ethanol. It is a horrible idea, terrible for the planet, makes too much CO2....and makes midwest farmers millionaires. It is as stupid as is the shockingly dumb cabal that runs Alz. funding.
They seemingly hate good ideas. It’s Harry Reid all over again. Every single nuclear rod used is still at the plants. He closed Yucca mountain, a place where we could protect and keep and eye on them, get them away from the plants...Zombie plants that are now closed with nuclear material laying around. Dumb
Especially when the older plants are based on 1950s technology and we have next gen nuclear plants that could safely produce abundant and clean electricity along with natural gas fired units. Sadly, we live in an idiocracy.
Ethanol funding also increases food prices by quite a bit. Livestock and poultry owners have to compete with the federal government to buy feed. That has to all get passed through to the consumer.
Amen, Earl. About the ethanol mafia, the first President to try to stop it? Richard Nixon. Fifty years ago. And every President since has taken a swing against it. Now we have more levers to move ever more corn-licker into cars.
I spent time in multiple gov't research bureaucracies to the point I could predict the conclusions of almost every review panel. The whole process is absurd. In one inventive program NIH gave up trying to discriminate between the good and bad: grants were awarded randomly. Didn't seem to make a great difference such is the power of the prevailing "truths" and enduring status.
Thank you for your comment. I think we all remember the Shrimp on the treadmill video emblematic of waste, fraud or abuse. At some point priorities will have to be considered.
Sadly I sit back and wonder is this the end of beginning of the American Empire or the beginning of the end. Looming Medicare funding shortfall isn’t enough to get our politicians to discuss a compromise. 3rd rail stuff I suppose. All it means is structural deficits, bigger debt. Apparently the idea of flushing a trillion dollars down the toilet in interest on the debt means nothing to some portion of our political class.
Our medical system is divided into two parallel paths. Allopathic (largely drug based) medicine gets all the money and prestige while integrative/functional medicine—which can be more effective in chronic illness—is a second class citizen, generally not covered by insurance or given the respect and support it deserves. I say this as someone who has lived 30 years with a major neurological disease. Both branches are important but functional approaches that actually work are never tried due to market forces that attempt to prioritize not what actually lowers symptoms and benefits patients but what makes a profit. Given the vast amount of suffering involved, this non-patient based approach is appalling. I have noticed that many doctors when faced with brain issues in their own families immediately embrace integrative medicine.
My cardiologist supported my refusal of statins in favor of dietary changes and a ramped up exercise program that reduced my cholesterol from 227 to 161. My GP remains skeptical and believes that the statins he prescribed but which I threw away due to adverse side effects were the reason. Notwithstanding a similar lipid panel six months on.
My optometrist told me that she has patients who were advised to treat their glaucoma but did not. Then they come back to her asking if laser surgery will fix their vision - and she has to point out that the nerve is already damaged - and no amount of focus will fix it.
Is it possible that Alzheimers is the same problem? We're trying to fix something that is already beyond repair?
There might be 10 researchers out there who are as brilliant at seeing thru the fog as Mr. Feynman. Maybe we should be concentrating on finding and supporting them - outside the normal (and failing) organizations?
Perhaps funding like Common Sense?
(And before anyone jumps on me - I lost my father to Alzheimers - I'm glad I only had one father to lose, I couldn't do it twice.)
Dear Ms. Silberner - Thank you for this excellent article. Obviously there is an ingrained case of group-think that is limiting the creative and rewarding the narrative. Have a blessed day. KenMc
There can be no cure for advanced Alzheimer's disease, since the brain's limited reconstruction facilities cannot replace large swaths of destroyed neurons with new cells with all right characteristics and connections.
Prevention - not cure or drugs - is the only way to thwart this and numerous other neurodegenerative diseases. The word "drug" appears 34 times in this article, but there is no mention of nutrition or vitamin D.
Without proper vitamin D3 supplementation, such as (for 70kg 154lb body weight without obesity, 0.125 mg 5000 IU a day) or recent extensive UV-B skin exposure, most people only have 5 to 25 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), which is made in the liver from vitamin D3. The immune system needs 50ng/mL (125nmol/L) or more to function properly - to mount full innate and adaptive responses to cancerous cells, viruses, bacteria and fungi and to reduce the chance of self-destructive inflammatory responses.
Inflammation is an indiscriminate cell destroying immune response primarily intended for multicellular parasites, such as intestinal worms (helminths). Our ancestors were ubiquitously infected with helminths, which long ago evolved compounds which downmodulate our inflammatory responses. The human immune response today evolved over millions of years to be overly-strong to counter this downmodulation. Now we are all dewormed, our inflammatory responses are overly-strong, with some people having genetic variations which gives them especially strong and inappropriately triggered inflammatory responses which cause psoriasis, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and the various neurodegenerative diseases.
Low 25(OH)D levels make this inflammation much worse. Many elderly people have only 1/10th to 1/4 of the circulating (25(OH)D) their immune systems need. So excessive, dysregulated, self-destructive, inflammation is easily triggered.
Ogura et al. 2021 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405650221000617 report that compared to healthy controls, whose 25(OH)D levels averaged 26.8ng/mL, Parkinson's disease (PD) sufferers averaged 13.4ng/mL and Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) sufferers averaged just 10.5ng/mL. PD, MSA and Dementia with Lewy Bodies are closely related, since they involve different patterns of misfolding of the alpha-synuclein protein (Ayers et al. 2022 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2113489119).
AD's etiology is somewhat different from that of PD/MSA/DLB but the details are unimportant from the point of view of prevention. What is needed is stronger innate and adaptive immune responses and especially better regulation of the inflammatory responses which are prone to being excessive, due to our lack of helminths. This requires at least 50ng/mL 25(OH)D, which most people can only be attain with proper vitamin D3 supplementation at levels above what most MDs think is required.
You won't read about this from drug companies, or from most professional researchers - whose goal must be to induce the funding of further research - since prevention (to a very large extent) of these neurodegenerative diseases involves better nutrition, especially regarding vitamin D, omega 3 fatty acids, magnesium and probably boron. To many MDs and PhDs, this sounds impossibly simple, but it is true. This knowledge and approach to prevention leaves no place for them as highly qualified, highly paid, gladiators against an enormous and poorly understood threat to health.
The scarily large "5000 IU" vitamin D a day requirement for average weight adults people is a gram every 22 years. Pharma grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram ex-factory. There's no need for drugs or more research.
Please read the research articles concerning vitamin D, the immune system, sepsis, influenza, COVID-19, autoimmune diseases, autism and neurodegeneration cited at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .
About 14 years ago, I discovered vitamin D as a very useful additional supplement for my depression. Its effect on my depression is slightly different from my lexapro, and it makes a tremendous difference.
I had been taking 4000IU in winter, 3000IU in spring and fall, and 2000IU in summer. But one spring a few years ago, my doctor finally decided to check my D level (I suspect she was worried that I was taking too much), and she discovered that my D level was on the low end of normal. So she said that I should not drop down to 2000IU for the summer, and could even increase.
Presently, I take 5000IU in summer and 6000IU in winter. Every time I turn around I see another health aspect that has been found to be benefited by vitamin D. Including Covid.
Apparently, different people have different abilities to absorb D orally. I participated in an informal study my doctor was conducting after testing low like you did. She had me taking 10,000 IU for a month and then retested me. Didn't even move the needle. So she wrote me a prescription for 100,000 IU for a month and retested. That moved the needle for me, but it was still below where she said it was supposed to be. She did not want me to continue at that level - not sure why. I think I take 10k IU a day now and have for awhile.
I highly recommend you drop the SSRI. But slowly. And read "Anatomy of an Epidemic".
Lexapro has been literally a magic drug for me. I take a fairly small dose (10mg), and the effect on my depression (I started taking it in 2004) was instant. I'm not willing to take a risk with that result, especially having experienced the pain of living with untreated severe depression for decades.
But I know that SSRIs do not help everyone with depression. My daughter has yet to find one that helps her the way Lexapro helps me.
I'm not sure you have THE answer but your alternative explanation is certainly a better alternative than the masking of symptoms which appears to be the modus operandi of pharma and the medical schools which are now almost entirely in their grasp.
Just by the luck of reading the right article at the right time I convinced my partner (and myself) to take up to 2000 IU of D3 a day, since what I had read was that patients having higher concentrations of D3 in their systems appeared to be doing much better against Covid than those who had less (this was early on in the pandemic). Not sure if it's helped us (though we seem to be less affected by colds etc..and never got Covid), but we're not letting go of it now.
When you look at a U.S. map of cancers/ disease... you see that multiple sclerosis is concentrated mainly in the northeast. I’ve always wondered if lack of sun /vitamin D played a role.
It isn't just in the U.S. I've seen maps of Europe that show it consistently more concentrated in the northern latitudes. Instead of seeing a vitamin D connection though, they typically postulate a "Germanic gene" for it.
I'm no scientist but my partner and I are definitely living a life that focuses on nutrition and food as medicine and a big focus on D3. Thank you for this I believe you have offered, as Bruce says below, certainly more alternative explanations than most scientists caught up in DRUGS have offered of late.
As a Biological Psychologist, I find this a very interesting story… However, it could be written about any number of scientific problems. In that sense, it's almost tautological. There are three factors at work here. First, people are people. We all live in a subjective world of belief systems that are very hard to change. If anyone — including a scientist — has a particular worldview (for instance, amyloid plaques are the sole cause of Alzheimer's), it is extremely difficult to change that point of view. Sometimes it's impossible. Think about the people who believe that they are actually reptiles:
Second, the concluding comments are correct. It's probably not the case that Alzheimer's has one single cause because, quite frankly, Alzheimer's is a diagnostic category which includes a variety of neurological conditions whose symptomatologies are similar (https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/how-alzheimers-disease-diagnosed). Most people don't realize that. It's analogous to the category "autism", or any of the other dementias. So, there probably will never be a single, "cure" for the condition.
Finally, as the article points out, it's impossible to affect one aspect of brain function (for instance, synaptic stability), without affecting other aspects of brain function. There will always be biological trade-offs. That's just a fact of the way biology works. In fact, based on what I know from studying brains for a few decades, it may be the case that the most we can hope for is easing the cognitive decline as aging progresses.
In any event, thank you for a very enjoyable and informative read, Frederick
It’s not merely “tautological”. Why don’t auto mechanic providers or chemical manufacturers have so many useless products and services like medicine? Or computer manufacturers, on an industry-wide basis?
It’s the market, and the absence of one in the medical and educational fields. Socialism and fascism entrench people and institutions into a cartel. Mere lack of demand doesn’t sway them. They get taxes and Fed funny money. They get to ban competition.
Imagine a world where you could just start a business to cure or treat cancer. Would that be so bad? Whole groups of alternative doctors, insurance and private certifiers could arise in place of the cartel systems and “govermentalities”, to provide consumer education, fraud protection and safety. Let the bolder risk takers prove what works and what doesn’t. Let the meek go to their usual cartel providers. I guarantee we’d start to see real medicine being done then! It’s just that dang simple.
That is how it used to be until government, primarily federal, over-regulation derailed the system(s). For our own good of course (said sarcastically). My take is that regulatory services are subject to capture.
Both my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather died of the disease about the time the name, Alzheimer’s entered the vernacular. One during the 1970s and the other in 1980s. I thought they’d have a cure for my parents for sure! My mother died of it 7 years ago. I’m really hoping at 50, it’s not too late for me. Thank you for this thoughtful article.
Kate, your comment was heartbreaking and very brave. I offer a salute from someone facing dementia as well. I don't have a definite diagnosis yet, but I see the signs.
The article failed to mention what the alternate theories are. That would be interesting.
Please google Dale Brednesen. He mentions 36 possible mechanisms in cognitive decline.
I hope you are getting a complete neurological work up to see if you have something that is interfering with cognitive function and look into Bredneson's work who is affiliated with UCLA and the Buck Institute in California
My husband's maternal grandmother had a much longer death from Alzheimer's than is typical (farm-raised bodies are exceptionally sturdy), and I was seeing signs of the disease in his mom in her mid 60s before she died of other causes. I'm terrified of what this may mean for my husband as we reach our mid 50s.
I'm very sorry. No one volunteers for this. It is very hard. But there are resources to check out, such as Brednesen for preventive health, and Teepa Snow, for a more positive approach to understanding and helping people with dementia. It is possible to live each day as it comes and to make people understand I am still me, for as long as I can, and to help me family prepare and learn how to help. I am lucky. I found out (will find out) early and am able to prepare. And there are medical tests now to check for Alzheimers. Things have actually come a long way in terms of diagnosis. It is prevention and cure that haven't arrived (but see above).
In a lifetime of academics, the best lesson I ever learned was skepticism. The more history you read, the more you encounter experts at the highest level who were spectacularly wrong. And often accompanying the ignorance of life in the Ivory Towers is arrogance - they don't know, and they won't listen. An always-lethal pair. Question everything and never back down.
This post reminds me of the fertile mind of Gary Larson who produced a Far Side cartoon depicting a gang of "ruffian astronomers" or some such who monopolized all the time spent looking through the only available telescope by intimidating milder comrades. Humor succeeds when the essence is true and people who are trying to research this disease can obviously relate to what was humorously portrayed. Human nature doesn't change just because the people in question are highly educated and esteemed professionals (probably it is magnified). The power recently wielded by Frances and Fauci as the NIH and NAIAD heads because of their bottleneck control of almost ALL research funding is ruinous; both to their character and our institutions. This juxtaposes the brilliance of the checks and balances once capable of keeping our governance on track, and parallels what happens when those systems get short-circuited.
My dad was diagnosed at age 52 back in 2000. At the time, I worked on Capitol Hill and immediately went to work researching and meeting with Pharma lobbyists and scientists who for sure would have something. We tried everything for my sweet dad, and after a few trials and a few useless drugs, decided to go off all of everything because the side effects were not worth it. He, and millions of others like him who have suffered the same end, are our heroes.
As I am a few years away from 50, I now worry I will meet the same end. We normal people don't understand why there hasn't been the promised breakthroughs, and attacking the hypothesized plaques from 22 years ago haven't made a difference.
Yet after the past three years where we have all publicly witnessed the complexities and biases within the FDA and government, and after we critical thinkers have been forced to look to alternative preventions and health treatments for this cold virus that has rocked our world, this article hints at the greater complexities of what the ALZ community faces. Could it be so sinister? It can't be ! A 'cabal' of researchers and big Pharma would sentence millions more to the same end by their refusal to entertain and promote any other ideas? Sounds too horrible to be true.
I wonder if ALZ is a type 3 diabetes. If inflammation has a larger role. Maybe we have been looking all a long down the wrong highway. Maybe it's more the body at its core: inflammation and trauma and how the body heals itself.
Thank you for this piece. If Big Pharma won't address, I suppose just like everything else these days, it will be up to us to find our own solutions and work together outside the mainstream. Sigh.
Schizophrenia is another illness in which the "breakthrough" medications are variations of the same belief that manipulation of neurotransmitters will manage the illness. Nothing much has happened in 50 years and the side effects can be horrific.
This quote stuck out to me: But as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
I’ve seen his warning play out time and time again in the medical field, where experts cannot say certain things for fear of upsetting the powers that be.
We need more scientists like Begley that are willing to go against their peers and suggest that some of their ideas are wrong.
And more scientists and physicians who courageously issued and supported the Great Barrington Declaration and who suffered the opprobrium and scorn of the DNC and their media handmaidens and their legions of dupes, many of whom screeched loudly on these pages.
conspiratard bot narrative
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Ah the slavering minions of the legion of dupes reliably appear......................
Ah, the psychotic paranoia-conspiratard dupe reliably appears ....................................
A retort worthy of a dull kindergartener. Try again.....
you bray like a jackass from the Alex Jonex/Koch Bros troll farm, just like the jackasses on the "left" bray cheap, meaningless [, toxic] slogans from the Soros troll farm.
your narratives all follow the same structure: idiotic propaganda, paranoia and circular reasoning.
you should be profoundly embarrassed by your absurd lies, but since you are a narcissistic sociopath (or a troll-b0t imitating a sociopath), you aren't.
A retort worthy of a psychotic troll. Try again ......
The role of iconoclast is a lonely and painful one, but so very necessary throughout our society.
A paradigm shift is the science equivalent of enlightenment. There are many dogmas currently plaguing the advancement of science.
How many valuable minds are wasted pursing the following paradigms which are unsupported by current observation?
Catastrophic Climate Change.
Big Bang Theory.
Mrna Vaccines.
And yet they continue to smack us with this trash over and over again. The Covid lockdowns were a case in point, there was no science there was fear and panic, and yet 21/2 years later the powers that be are still smacking us with the same BS it beggars belief at times!
They seem to be hypnotized.
Don't laugh.
Therapists use hypnosis videos to treat patients. Regular watching enhances the effect. Daily watching is almost a certainty.
You have a point, if it’s not your iPhone it’s your iPad, if not those two, its cable, for recreation it’s Netflix they are where we live and eat we need to get them out of lives, the deep state is brainwashing it’s very scary.
Yep.
That, or the queen of diamonds....
I think these problems also reflect the Green Religion science. There are far too careers invested in the 'peer reviewed' theory that humans have contributed, to some degree, to climate change, and what, if anything, can be done to reverse it.
My father developed Alzheimer's at the same time as the author's and died after eight years. His father did as well. Needless to say I've always donated generously to Alzheimer's societies hoping for a cure before I suffered the same fate, but can see I was just pissing my money away.
Another thing to remember when the Left references 'settled science'.
I couldn't help but notice the similarity to the research into our changing climate as I read this sad tale of bureaucratic group think and the profound effect that such rigidity to a theory can have on research.
This is an inheritable disease. I hope that you have not bred and continued the problem. We are no better than other animals, many of whom we breed for superiority. German Shepherds suffer from hip displasia. We suffer from much worse.
Chances are you're simply trolling, but in the event anyone actually takes you seriously, yes, I believe there is a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer's, but there is also for many cardiac, orthopedic and other disorders, and they've come up with treatments and therapies to deal with them.
Grotesque comment. There is probably a genetic component to Alzheimer’s but it’s not 100%, doesn’t arise until very late in life, and shouldn’t preclude having children in any case. You sound like a eugenicist.
There is nothing wrong with being a eugenicist when it serves the purpose of screening for debilitating diseases that bankrupt families and could be avoided with screening and therapeutic abortion. I wonder how many people are dealing with the care of drooling idiots and succoring themselves with the chant, "It's God's will" or something else like that.
Forget God if you must, but is it not nature's will that we mate and reproduce in spite of our genetic defects?
Today, some in society view autism as a defect. Elon Musk is a very productive member of society who has Asperger's, a mild form of this "defect".
Perhaps the things we view as defects are actually positive steps in human evolution.
Would you have advised that Musk be aborted?
So happy you are not reproducing
Beth - I am guessing you have not ‘bred.’ I am guessing you are not a people person.
And German eugenists tried an even stronger mediation.
There is a difference between what they did and using modern science to keep people from breeding their obviously inferior genes. Time to stop bringing up that tired, emotional, and untrue example to keep those of us who shouldn't breed breeding. They were killing groups of people just to kill them. There is no comparison, even if you want one.
Alzheimer's develops relatively late in life. Is it horrible? Yes. But your stance would have robbed us of people who accomplished spectacular things before the disease struck. President Reagan comes immediately to mind. I'm sure there are legions of others that research would uncover. Not to mention the many people who were simply kind, loving and supportive parents and friends. You are perfectly entitled to refrain from passing on your genes. But your nostrum would have robbed the world of some very talented and gifted people who gave much to society.
Great comment. I think the genetics of it arent a sure thing in any event.
Your opinion. Mine differs. I don't think we're smart enough to know what genes are good and what are bad necessarily. Look at all the British and American eugenics ideas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
You cite information that is over 100 years old. Things have moved light years beyond them. What HASN'T changed is the fact that we are no different than any other carbon unit, flora or fauna. I say this as one who is a product of a family that has a history of cancer. I live with a Damocles sword over my head and thankfully I have no children to whom I will pass it on. Knowing that, were I to have had children, how is that any different than abusing them???? Just a matter of degree.
Oh, and in every example you cite, those disorders were easily fixed with lifestyle changes and exercise, as well as x-rays which could see the problems. There is no comparison.
In fact, exercise HAS been proven to help prevent AD. Controlling hypertension is another. Smoking cessation is yet another. There are more. We just need doctors to address these issues before the onset of symptoms instead of trying to treat a disease with medicines that actually do nothing. Not everyone with "Alzheimers gene" gets Alzheimer's. And many who have Alzheimer's don't carry the gene. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31964800/
Check out Dr. Richard Isaacson's work. Here is a link to his interview on a podcast I subscribe to. Or you could just google him. He is at the forefront of preventative medicine for Alzheimer's.
https://peterattiamd.com/category/diseases/neurodegenerative-disease-prevention/
Most of us are not bred to please someone's idea of an aesthetic, including yours.
We are naturally attracted to find a mate and reproduce, regardless of our genetic "defects". If Alzheimer's were subject to natural selection, then nature would take care of it. Old age is not a genetic defect, it's a necessity of life, and he debilitation that comes with old age takes many forms, some of which can be treated in a humane way.
Surely you don't object to treating humans humanely?
Why do you presume that I would not want to treat ANY sentient being less than humanely? How is it humane, however, to increase lifespans to the point where dementia and related diseases are almost inevitable? Keeping individuals staggering around or even worse, warehoused in so-called "retirement" centers while their last dollars are siphoned out of the bank, is hardly humane. Many of those centers are constantly shorthanded and the residents are often left to fester in their own waste products for hours. Yeah, humane my ass.
Well, you did write you would prefer they be aborted, and never have a chance to live. That does not sound humane to me. Some of the most debilitated people I know prefer life as they are over never having lived.
100 years ago most people did not live long enough to become demented. We are so humane that we have found ways for people to live longer and more productive lives. The trade off is that we have more people with old age related disease. For most of us, having grandparents around longer is preferable to having them die young. Most Grandparents also want to watch their Grandchildren grow up. It's probably the biggest reward in life, regardless of how disabled one becomes.
Not so long ago, families lived together with grandparents as a family unit. I agree that sending to the nursing home has had a negative effect on society. So we agree on something. Like abortion, it has been done mostly out of convenience, but it is still better than casting them out in the street to die or suffer. They do get better medical care than most families can provide in the home.
We live in an age of developing gene therapies. We have RNAi vectors for gene suppression under development, and I have been personally involved with cell-type-specific vectors. That combination should unleash fantastic power and control over our genetic inheritances.
We are an inventive lot. We had better be, because most of us have at least one deleterious gene. We could fix our inherited components, which sounds far more appealing to me than eugenics.
I love science and tech, but you have more faith than I in the scientists involved in the pharmaceutical business.
How smart is it to practice gain of function in the middle of a crowded city? Today it's still being done in Wuhan and other insecure locations. War torn Ukraine has Pharma labs practicing gain of function.
So tell me again how smart are these scientists? Science does not require trust, it is a process and not a person. Many scientists today have proven themselves unworthy if trust, especially those in the high profit pharmaceutical businesses. Medical science is more of a "soft science" and is often wrong. Why else would your doctor recommend a second "opinion"? Because it's more opinion than hard science.
We actually paid them billions for an ineffective clean up of their own global man made environmental disaster. Over 5 million dead and every human damaged in some way, and yet they are treated as heroes?
Forgive me for not replying for so very long. You have made many good points regarding the advertised moral worth vs the actual morality of scientists in general. I earned my PhD at a corrupt institution, and was forcibly redirected from fiscally promising research after dedicating years to it in an effort by others to try to insulate a tenured prof from the legal consequences of his actions. I also personally intervened and halted an (accidental) gain-of-function project by my then-colleagues, who were oblivious to the dangers it posed. Doing so won me stunned admiration but no friends, but I sleep well at night knowing that I helped prevent a different COVID-level incident more than two decades before the one you wrote about.
Knowledge is power. Some get drunk on it. Others use it in "sheepdog" fashion, and risk much to prevent the worst things from happening. I knew the late 1990's papers on Ad5 vectors were hiding something (dangerous immunogenicity), and proposed a fix (site-directed peglyation) as the project for advanced standing for my Doctorate. How I wish I could have followed up on it in a timely manner and saved a few lives (and an emerging industry!!) There is much, much more I could add here.
While it is true that our leadership is often morally bankrupt, there are still those who work towards moral outcomes.
"experts cannot say certain things for fear of upsetting the powers that be." I think this is how we came to the Trans Takeover of Medicine including "Gender Affirming Care". What is more shocking is that no mainstream journalists want to practice real journalism for the same reasons.
NPR is among the worst. It would be nice if Joanne or someone would speak to her colleagues about one sided reporting and major omissions of facts.
Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans say:
"Today on National Predator Radio..."
https://pitt.substack.com/p/today-on-national-predator-radio
"On October 6th, I listened to Melissa Block on NPR report that “Courts have blocked a number of the anti-LGBTQ laws from going into effect” and, as usual with NPR’s reporting on this issue, my blood began to boil. From start to finish, the gender ideology movement turns language upside down and NPR, amongst many others, including journalists, is fully participating in the lies to support the trans movement’s agenda. In order to win and save our children we must retake language. I will start."
And
"Where are the American Mainstream Journalists?"
https://pitt.substack.com/p/where-are-the-american-mainstream
"Have you heard the latest headlines out of the U.K, that the National Health Service has ended “gender-affirming care” and replaced it with “holistic and appropriate” care? This is huge news—and a huge departure from the way it’s been for the last decade—and the way it continues to be in the US. Maybe you should study the Cass review that concluded that gender affirming care provides very low evidence.
So, why is this not being reported? Why instead are Americans being subjected to breathless news reports about trans influencers getting cookies from Biden in the White House, touting Biden’s diehard support of trans-everything?"
Yes, I kept thinking, "Boy isn't that pot calling the kettle black!" after reading that she worked for NPR. She only recognizes the problem when it strikes close to home. I wonder if it will change her at all? Will she be able to see it working in other areas in the future?
Exactly
Her last NPR report appears to have been dated June 2021.
She apparently became a "freelance" journalist July 2021, which correlates to her first reporting on the problems with Alzheimer's drugs:
https://goodstory.io/ep-16-the-abracadabra-of-the-fdas-surprise-approval-of-biogens-alzheimers-drug-aduhelm-dr-robert-pearl-physician-author-podcast-co-host-fixing-healthcar/
So, it is possible (1000% speculation) that NPR refused to let her report on the problems with Alzheirmer's drugs, so she left NPR (but still retains some loyalty and thus isn't dishing the dirt).
I would not be surprised to find that that is the case. Doctrinaire stupidity is the order of the day at National (Predictable) Radio.
-- a former listener for thirty-five years
There was a recent TikTok posted by a girl w/her uterus in a glass jar complete w/a little illuminating light to set it on for display. Look she said 'there's my cervix'. In another TikTok a young man/woman (couldn't tell by looking) who had gone through 'gender affirming' care was holding a literal hand basket full of pills pleading that others not make the mistake saying "I hate my life -I hate it'. -------- Can American horror get any deeper? Yes.
It is American Horror. It starts with the ideology which is backed by the State. Please see today's PITT:
"Parents' Response to LQBTQ Talks in Schools"
https://pitt.substack.com/p/parents-response-to-lqbtq-talks-in
Feynman was brilliant. He is worth some study - books by him and about him.
Plus down to earth, funny and approachable. We need more like him desperately.
Cancer was mentioned in the article as being more advanced in therapies than Alzheimer's. As I am no doctor I stand to be corrected, but as the quote alludes, it is the reality on the ground that matters. Immune therapies are all the rage in cancer care now, but it took seventy years of repeated failures from the standard approach of radiology and chemotherapy to enable an alternative approach to emerge. And only then were dissenting voices finally heard.
The reality of failure and disappointment, if repeated enough, does concentrate the mind and force a different approach. Even pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment will have to acknowledge that, eventually.
Perhaps when the standard theory to Alzheimers therapy is met by such pronounced and long term failure, we will see an alternative arise since the research establishment will be obligated to change course. We're just not there yet. Soon, hopefully.
We keep just treating the symptoms, or just cut off the body part that is diseased. Most treatements for disease just help us survive, not thrive. The root of the problem is our lifestyle, and the poisons in our enviroment, including the chemicals in processed foods. Alzheirmers start decades before we show symptoms. No one seems to ask why there is so much Alzheimers, Autism, type 2 diabetes, cancer, etc. Well they do, but they are silenced or ignored. But the treatments are a cash cow for the medical system.
Necessity forced it upon me. A family member suffered from a proteinopathy that was to claim her life. But before it did, I determined to find an alternative. There is one, but it may need work yet. I (and others) believe the root cause is free radicals in the form of free electrons damaging proteins that distort as a result, lose function and become resistant to clearance.The two parts of the approach are to 1.) Reduce the effect of the source by ingesting a redox dye, methylene blue, and 2.) Deliberately trigger the Autophagy system with drugs that are already FDA approved. They do exist; see Nature Chemical Biology "Novel targets for Huntington’s disease in an mTOR independent autophagy pathway" Andrea Williams was the primary author; David Rubinsztein ran the laboratory. 2008 was the year, but I had an online version without the proper reference. My apologies!
He was great
“If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.” — Richard Feynman
“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain
And
“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” — Richard Feynman
My fave Twain quote
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
–Mark Twain
Before Feynman, there was Mark Twain: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Same as it ever was.
While Feynman's genius was in itself something unusual even in a field of genius, it's his characteristic courage combined with his unusual genius which made him so important and so very rare.
Science education has been failing across many of its varied disciplines The proper place to address these scandalous stories is in the places where scientists of all disciplines begin and conclude their studies. There are precious few like Richard Feynman; but anyone can--and ought to--learn from his examples. We are suffering needless harms because so many have not.
"If we keep clearly before our minds that our theories are our own work; that we are fallible; and that our theories reflect our fallibility, then we shall doubt whether general features of our theories, such as their simplicity, or their prima facie deterministic character, correspond to features of the real world."
--- Karl Popper, pp. 42-43, "The Open Universe", (1982), Hutchinson & Co. publishers, London.
I’m re-reading The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. It’s a timely reminder of the catastrophic power of bureaucratic manipulation to divert funding, blight reputations, and destroy careers. The public is left bewildered, wondering why things don’t work. Whether or not there’s a single Robert Moses-like (or Anthony Fauci-like) figure at the top of the Alzheimer’s research ecology, the symptoms are clear. The myriads of researchers arrange themselves like iron filings around a magnet, eager for funding and promotion, and terrified of retaliation. And the public is bewildered, mourning their sick loved ones, wondering why the Alzheimer’s research process doesn’t work.
I have read The Power Broker. I was also reminded of a seminal book, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. The group think is a manifestation of a paradigm, i.e., a way of thinking. The plaque paradigm seemingly prevents alternative way of thinking and thereby limits research and careers. This is often the way science is done. It takes brave souls to break the paradigm.
Yes, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions offers an extremely relevant diagnosis of what has gone wrong with so much of modern pharmaceutical research.
Kuhn demonstrates that the great scientific revolutions were triggered by paradigm-breakers who were creative, visionary thinkers. They were (and are) intellectually courageous and often mystical in temperament, more like artists than (average) scientists.
Not surprisingly, this mentality is the opposite of the brute-force, massively-scaled, lavishly funded group-think approach to contemporary scientific research, especially pharmaceutical research, in which hundreds if not thousands of compounds are tested to see what might work. That approach works great when the fundamental science is understood (often, thanks to an earlier visionary).
But when the existing scientific paradigm is wrong, the current approach to scientific research produces only a vast waste of resources—time and money—and the cruel thwarting of the hopes of sick patients and their loved ones.
For those who have not read it, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn is one of the five best books I have read -- and that is a high bar. Dry as all get out, but the ideas about how change actually comes about are brilliant and correct far beyond just science.
If you have not read it and you are a thinking, involved person, run out and do so. You will not regret it.
Kuhn's book is the best remembered book of all the books I read in high school. If my recollection is good Kuhn asserted that old paradigms, like the amyloid-beta hypothesis, die with the death of their adherents. Kuhn's assertions predated the internet.
I agree with other commentators that the work of Dale Bredesen and The End of Alzheimer's is a worthwhile read.
I believe it was like that with modern physics and cosmology too: a generation had to die out before anyone took the new advances seriously. Of course, if this is true, it doesn't bode well for the many current controversies over the failure of dominant paradigms.
If it’s the same with politics that would explain the median age of all our top politicians and leaders.
What were the other 4 books?
It is an eclectic mix: L'Etranger by Camus, Please Understand Me by Kiersey/Bates, 1984 by Orwell, and The Trial by Kafka. These are all books that have changed the way I look at the world in a significant fashion not only when I read them but, pretty much, permanently.
There are lots of others, but these and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions make up my top five.
I have read those. Another book that has had great impact on my life is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The journey vs the destination.
There's irony in citing approvingly Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (SoSR) from a pro-Silberner point of view, which I decidedly share. I believe it's fair to say that Professor Selkoe is a confirmed disciple of the Kuhnian view. It's fine, of course, to read Kuhn's SoSR but a great mistake to stop there. An extensive philosophical debate went on between Kuhn and another philosopher of science, Karl R. Popper. Those advocates of Kuhn's views should, if they have not already done so, read Popper's "Poverty of Historicism" and "The Logic of Scientific Discovery".
Wikipedia has a page devoted to the "Kuhn-Popper debate".
I agree. Both of the Popper books you mentioned are on my shelf...but I am a bibliophile and have found many books with which I have difficulty parting. The thing that so impacted me with SoSR was how applicable it is to virtually any part of life. We are watching it play out in so many areas now -- some science and some scientism and some just social -- but one can almost predict what the revolution will be...then it is just a matter of timing it. (If I were better at the timing, I suppose I would play the stock market...lol.)
This is why picking "Top Five" is so hard -- there are really a top 500 when you think about it.
Enjoyed your thoughts.
In each case, from one point of view and an opposing view, Kuhn and Popper were engaged in a polemic not about what"scientific inquiry" "is" but what it ought to be, how it ought to be pursued--the basic informing philosophy which practitioners of science ought to adopt.
Kuhn's SoSR, while still part of my library, is nowhere near my top five or top "anything."
As for the market, indeed, you could do that. This would be an excellent time to dump any shares of Biogen.
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Interesting article criticizing peer review: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Yes indeed. I know a physician scientist who has developed an effective non-pharma therapy for treating certain neurocognitive disorders, and he is being mocked, disparaged, and shunned by the academic cabal. Soon it will be recognized as effective, and the cabal will just move on and not apologize for anything.
Such a fantastic book. Caro is a national treasure.
He is. And, sure, Moses was a master manipulator and power broker, but let's not forget all the good he did and the lives he improved with treasures such as Jones Beach an the bridges, tunnels and highways such as the LI parkways. Not all of his projects were wrong headed.
That’s kind of the point: Caro demonstrates how Moses’s early successes on then-sparsely-populated Long Island gave him the popularity and power to exercise the same autocratic (and often illegal) methods on densely populated Manhattan, with tragic and irreversible results. He started out as an idealist, certainly, and initially did much good for the public, but he became a tyrannical monster who had to be stopped. Some day we may find that Fauci’s career followed a similar trajectory.
I think we should replace land acknowledgments with "knowledge acknowledgments" This would take two paths
1 I acknowledge that I have insufficient knowledge to opine or comment on a subject
2 I acknowledge that I have deep knowledge about a subject but insufficient knowledge to understand the societal consequences of my opinions.
That should limit the bloviations of most people.
We could debate this endlessly. I don't see Moses as a monster, just a man who did a lot of good but fell victim to the absolute power paradigm. And given that Westway was never built, I'm not sure that what Moses did in Manhattan was "tragic and irreversible." And the list of improvements he made to the city and its quality of life are impressive and long.
What you write is, of course, true. Perhaps we should agree to disagree. But he needlessly destroyed Sunset Park in Brooklyn and he had other ambitions that were thankfully unrealized. He also destroyed the careers of scores, if not hundreds, of outstanding men and practiced McCarthyism before McCarthy. You may want to re-read the chapters dealing with the mid- to late-30s. They're not pretty.
Like Caro's study of Robert Moses, another, and more general treatment of this social phenomenon of group-think in its hyper-rationalist variety (Loyola, Richelieu & others), is John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West" (1992).
We remain stuck in that dictatorship and, if anything, matters have considerably worsened since Saul wrote that brilliant essay.
My father died of Alzheimer's and my sister was diagnosed with Early Onset at the age of 58 in October 2021. This article points out very well how the medical, pharma, and governmental agencies are captured and are driven by money and not results. Billions of dollars wasted. I encourage anyone with concerns about themselves or their loved ones to check out Dr. Dale Bredesen's work. The End of Alzheimer's Program. His method involves addressing the many underlying issues that may be causing the brain to decline. Diet, toxins, gut health, parasites, and many others. Not a magic bullet like a drug, but there are people seeing improvements. I'm praying my sister is one of them.
Yes, diet and toxins primarily, both affecting gut health, parasites, inflammation, etc.
My mother is in a fog of dementia right now. She had spent over 20 years taking statins to reduce cholesterol. She never questioned her doctor or tried to reduce cholesterol through changing her diet.
Even worse, about 10 years ago she got lazy with cooking and discovered prepared foods - breaded and deep-fried (in trans fats) meats and starches. The only fresh things she ate was cucumbers and apples.
When the pandemic hit and going to the grocery store became onerous, I started feeding her. I bought her frozen dinners that had lean meats, lots of vegetables and minimal starches. Unfortunately, her mental decline by that point was too great, and the social isolation and loss of routines erased any improvement. I moved her into my house 3 months ago because she could no longer live on her own.
Statins, I believe, are a major cause of cognitive decline, but what's even worse is the attitude that pills are the answer to an atrocious diet. Both the doctors and their patients are to blame.
AL:
All the best to your mother, lost my sister to Alzheimer’s in 2020, long road of decline and suffering, not to mention over $1 million in care costs.
Am curious as to your concern about Statins, why do you think they are causative? Thanks.
Thank you, Jim. I read a long time ago that cholesterol was an important component of the brain. So I thought that a drug that reduced cholesterol would not discriminate between types and locations of cholesterol in the body.
Even 20 years ago, some medical researchers were voicing concerns about statins causing cognitive impairment. Then 5 years ago, a friend of mine (a psychiatrist who specializes in geriatric dementia) self-funded a study to see if statins caused cognitive decline. She tested 6 different statins, and found that 5 of them were detrimental, two of them seriously. The one outlier actually improved cognitive function.
My friend has not been able to publish her study or even discuss the results. Journals, which are heavily funded by pharma companies, didn't even want to review it, and the hospital where she works told her not to mention it. But when I was trying to sort through my mom's numerous pills, I asked her what she knew about statins and dementia, and she told me what I wrote above. My mother had been taking one of the worst offenders.
I had an atypical negative reaction to the statin that was prescribed for me in my mid 30s: double vision and episodes of light-headedness. So I have rejecting taking any since then.
I've tried a number of "natural" meds, including high doses of purified krill oil, without my numbers budging in the slightest. I had a full cardiovascular workup a few years when I was experiencing some mild angina on climbing stairs, and everything is clear and healthy in there, despite at least two decades of untreated (and untreatable) slightly high cholesterol. Evidently my body prefers it that way, regardless of what "research" says.
I am currently taking a statin (and two other drugs for cholesterol in small doses. I also have two copies of the APIO E4 gene that apparently predisposes me to Alzheimers. Is there any way I could get my eyes on your friend's study, while I still have sufficient wits to read it?
Here is an interesting viewpoint on the subject of cholesterol lowering meds and AD by a physician. He points out that statins that are lipophilic (Zocor and Lipitor) can cross the blood brain barrier and lower cholesterol levels in the brain, while those that are hydrophilic (Crestor and Pravachol) do not. That may be the reason for the differences in the drugs tested in the above paper. He discusses the two synthetic pathways of cholesterol in the body. One is more prominent in the brain-the product of which is desmosterol. Desmosterol levels tend to be low in AD patients. It can be measured in your blood and is reflective of desmosterol in your brain and can be tracked over time, with the desired level being at least 1.0 mg/L.
https://peterattiamd.com/does-low-cholesterol-cause-cognitive-impairment-part-i/
https://peterattiamd.com/does-low-cholesterol-cause-cognitive-impairment-part-ii/
The problem is not many physicians are tuned in to preventative medicine when it comes to AD. Someone has already mentioned Dale Bredesen. I would encourage you to google Richard Isaacson, as well. He was at Cornell but has recently moved to Florida Atlantic and set up a new clinic. There needs to be more clinics like this! Wait times are staggering.
I have tried to get it from her. I will try again.
I would like to see this information as well. Thank you and sending you good wishes as you care for your dear mom.
Thank you!
Please share with me too. Thank you in advance!
Please God wish your sister well!
We learned the words" alzheimers disease "back in 1978. Not a household phrase then. In fact for awhile it was a staple for jokes on late night TV. No one is laughing now
Dale Bredesen, a neurologist/researcher in San Diego published a book about 5 years ago called The End of Alzheimer's in which he details how he has been able to CURE Alzheimer's in close to 80% of cases in his clinic, using his individually-tailored approach. He has only been able to do studies on small cohorts of patients because no one is willing to fund his apparently successful approach since it doesn't involve the use of potentially blockbuster drugs. Instead involves the application of fairly simple, not terribly expensive, but highly effective treatments. He has observed that Alzheimer's is mostly caused by inflammation, lack of what he calls "trophic factors" such as hormone, vitamin and other biochemical deficiencies, and toxic exposures. His approach involves reducing inflammation, replacement of deficient trophic factors, and detoxification. He present numerous cases in his book of fairly advanced cases of Alzheimer's which recovered fully under his care. There are still about 20% of patients he is unable to help with his methods, so there is clearly something missing from his analysis, but his results of approximately 80% recovery are astounding to me. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Alzheimer's disease or dementia more generally.
My mother passed away from a very aggressive form of early onset dementia and my father in law is currently suffering. I read Dr. Bredesen's book as well - fascinating. I found out about his work after listening to him interviewed on the Found My Fitness podcast. For anyone who has someone suffering from this disease I'd strongly recommend listening. Neither the book or the podcast offer a silver bullet, but do offer a preventative approach - which seems to be lacking. I have incorporated some of what I have learned into my lifestyle. Given the tone and thoroughness of the article I was surprised Dr. Bredesen wasn't mentioned. Perhaps it is another example of suppression and keeping him from having a voice.
I was also surprised it wasn’t mentioned.
I was just about to post about this groundbreaking book. There are many Md's and functional medicine practitioners trained in this protocol and treating thousands of people. It won't make anyone billions of dollars, but the success rate beats anything by far that the pharmaceutical companies have produced.
Agree. Dr Brednesen likens the approach to plugging all 36 holes of a roof. Hence, his multifactorial treatment approach. Not JUST the Amyloid hypothesis. See his list of 36 mechanisms from his book, The End of Alzheimers. Some patients have shown remarkable cognitive improvement.
My mother has AD. We took her to a practitioner who administers the Bredesen protocol. There are a few problems that keep it from becoming mainstream. One is that it is intense as far as the amount of lab work and frequent assessments, most of which are not covered by insurance. The diet restrictions were too detailed for my mother to follow, not to mention she couldn’t understand how/ did not believe that this might help her. It requires many supplements, which can be quite expensive. We couldn’t get my mother to take them. She was to far along to see the benefit.
Even though it is far more complicated than just taking a magic pill, it is the best answer we have. Richard Isaacson is another physician who has a preventative protocol for AD. We need more of these trailblazing doctors, who are willing to invest the kind of time it takes to tackle the disease before it takes hold.
I had a similar road with my Mom. I hear you. Wishing you and your family the best. And hoping the trailblazers refine the work and make it easier even in more advanced cases.
Thank you for the book recommendation. Very interesting, indeed.
Apparently we didn’t watch the recent destruction of effective treatments for another disease in spite of hundreds of positive peer reviewed studies and entire regions that saw swift resolution to huge numbers of cases.
Nothing new at all.
By that time even the dullest wit could see that every news outlet was using the same phrases, reporting on the same stories, at the same instant , and were clearly being told what to report. Had been for years. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to find it here in this other medical story, it’s been going on in that field for decades.
The word disinformation is such a specialized piece of jargon… how did it suddenly spring into everyday vocabulary?
Anytime you hear every voice shouting the same thing you’re either at a concert or you’re being drowned in propaganda. And when there’s a big story yet every voice falls silent, you’re being drowned in it again. ahh dintcha know??
Never forget that if we were in the 1700s or 1800s and we had the same news outlets, they would call anyone questioning the efficacy of bleeding or mercury treatments a "spreader of disinformation." These robotic dupes should be treated like the fools they are. Cheerleaders for stupidity. Nothing more.
Considering all the horrible effects of "best practice" medicine over the centuries, you would think that the medical profession should have a bit more humility and hesitation about "orthodox" medicine. I have met only a tiny number of doctors over the years who had that humility. Too many of them believe themselves to be gods.
How about a company which leaks a noxious substance in a major metropolis and then charges the public to clean it up?
Big oil? No, big pharma. How intelligent is it to create novel viruses in the midst of a crowded metropolis. Unlike an oil spill, this spill propogated to every corner of the planet. Even wild animals are suffering.
How do they avoid prosecution? They become heroes, saving the day with "free" vaccines that did not work, and made billions in profit with zero liability for damages.
They may have escaped liability for the vaccine, but they have not escaped liability for their careless research.
Keep in mind that big pharma is the biggest sponsor of nightly news and of politicians, so expect no help from them.
Only a grass roots movement will bring justice for this horrific crime. 6 million dead and everyone on the planet damaged physically and/or financially.
The quietest tragedy I have ever seen.
What happened to liberals? They once hated big corporations, now they follow them like lambs. This should cross party lines.
When does the grass movement start? Please keep FP posted, there are a lot of us here who are right next to and right behind you. America is tired of the lying, cheating and diabolical behavior of our leadership and politicians. Please don’t expect liberals to help or Democrats to do anything both are the cause of all our problems we must really this time come 2024 vote them out.
Vote? They have that rigged too.
Why do I trust government with my vote when they don't even trust me with a receipt. My bank gives me a receipt. I can check my balance online. I can make deposits from anywhere in the world without them getting lost in the mail. Instant results and 100% secure. Auditable.
There are secure, auditable ways to hold elections using tried and true methods. Someone does not want secure elections. See my Substack article entitled "Doubt Relief" for one example.
GG you know how I am fighting back I’m voting with my feet I don’t buy corporations anymore no more Coke,Nike,Adidas, definitely no Disney don’t do any FB and have shut the MSM out of my house.I have been shopping and doing coffee locally in my community I have gotten back into my Temple listening to some really good sermons and I can tell you my sprits have perked up a bit, 2023 doesn’t look so gloomy anymore😃
I've had my television on timeout for a couple of years. I'm not going to be one of their products. I feel much better about life.
Yip me to since the lockdowns I have done away with my cable. Been much healthy for my family the next move is probably Netflix not enjoying like I use to
Going to read your Substack today thank you for info, and YES I agree the vote is rigged big time. Covid was the perfect storm for the Democrats to cement the rig which they duly did. But we got to fight back GG.
Yip we have been gaslighted!
The stubbornness of humans and science is confounding. Take todays insane fealty to battery powered vehicles. The list of production problems and availability is well known. Rare metals needed means massive new strip mining. China controlling a plethora of those rare earth metals. Nobody wants to recycle those batteries. It is expensive, hard and unclean. With the Avg. price of an EV at $62,000 most people cannot afford to buy or lease. When the lease ends, who is going to buy a used one that may need battery replacement. Winter weather degrades efficiency. Who is going to pay for chargers at 100 unit apartment buildings? You going to have wires laying on ground from each apartment? CA told EV owners not charge their vehicles during peak hours. It will take years to switch over to alll EV’s of our 275 million registered transportation fleet. Fuel Cells are better tech, you could use existing infrastructure. Why don’t we? Because the activist nuts that have taken over the Democrat Party hate anything to do with the oil and gas industry. We could have switched our transportation fleet to natural gas decades ago. Reduced CO2 by 30%. But Nooooo. It supported the oil and gas industry. It is the same thinking that got us the worst environmental program that costs us billions. Ethanol. It is a horrible idea, terrible for the planet, makes too much CO2....and makes midwest farmers millionaires. It is as stupid as is the shockingly dumb cabal that runs Alz. funding.
Or we could’ve built out nuclear after the example of 1979.
Politics seems to just ruin good ideas on purpose.
They seemingly hate good ideas. It’s Harry Reid all over again. Every single nuclear rod used is still at the plants. He closed Yucca mountain, a place where we could protect and keep and eye on them, get them away from the plants...Zombie plants that are now closed with nuclear material laying around. Dumb
Especially when the older plants are based on 1950s technology and we have next gen nuclear plants that could safely produce abundant and clean electricity along with natural gas fired units. Sadly, we live in an idiocracy.
Indeed
Ethanol funding also increases food prices by quite a bit. Livestock and poultry owners have to compete with the federal government to buy feed. That has to all get passed through to the consumer.
Amen, Earl. About the ethanol mafia, the first President to try to stop it? Richard Nixon. Fifty years ago. And every President since has taken a swing against it. Now we have more levers to move ever more corn-licker into cars.
I spent time in multiple gov't research bureaucracies to the point I could predict the conclusions of almost every review panel. The whole process is absurd. In one inventive program NIH gave up trying to discriminate between the good and bad: grants were awarded randomly. Didn't seem to make a great difference such is the power of the prevailing "truths" and enduring status.
Thank you for your comment. I think we all remember the Shrimp on the treadmill video emblematic of waste, fraud or abuse. At some point priorities will have to be considered.
Sadly I sit back and wonder is this the end of beginning of the American Empire or the beginning of the end. Looming Medicare funding shortfall isn’t enough to get our politicians to discuss a compromise. 3rd rail stuff I suppose. All it means is structural deficits, bigger debt. Apparently the idea of flushing a trillion dollars down the toilet in interest on the debt means nothing to some portion of our political class.
Our medical system is divided into two parallel paths. Allopathic (largely drug based) medicine gets all the money and prestige while integrative/functional medicine—which can be more effective in chronic illness—is a second class citizen, generally not covered by insurance or given the respect and support it deserves. I say this as someone who has lived 30 years with a major neurological disease. Both branches are important but functional approaches that actually work are never tried due to market forces that attempt to prioritize not what actually lowers symptoms and benefits patients but what makes a profit. Given the vast amount of suffering involved, this non-patient based approach is appalling. I have noticed that many doctors when faced with brain issues in their own families immediately embrace integrative medicine.
I tell my patients that diet, and especially, exercise are “magic pills”!!
My cardiologist supported my refusal of statins in favor of dietary changes and a ramped up exercise program that reduced my cholesterol from 227 to 161. My GP remains skeptical and believes that the statins he prescribed but which I threw away due to adverse side effects were the reason. Notwithstanding a similar lipid panel six months on.
My optometrist told me that she has patients who were advised to treat their glaucoma but did not. Then they come back to her asking if laser surgery will fix their vision - and she has to point out that the nerve is already damaged - and no amount of focus will fix it.
Is it possible that Alzheimers is the same problem? We're trying to fix something that is already beyond repair?
There might be 10 researchers out there who are as brilliant at seeing thru the fog as Mr. Feynman. Maybe we should be concentrating on finding and supporting them - outside the normal (and failing) organizations?
Perhaps funding like Common Sense?
(And before anyone jumps on me - I lost my father to Alzheimers - I'm glad I only had one father to lose, I couldn't do it twice.)
Dear Ms. Silberner - Thank you for this excellent article. Obviously there is an ingrained case of group-think that is limiting the creative and rewarding the narrative. Have a blessed day. KenMc
There can be no cure for advanced Alzheimer's disease, since the brain's limited reconstruction facilities cannot replace large swaths of destroyed neurons with new cells with all right characteristics and connections.
Prevention - not cure or drugs - is the only way to thwart this and numerous other neurodegenerative diseases. The word "drug" appears 34 times in this article, but there is no mention of nutrition or vitamin D.
Without proper vitamin D3 supplementation, such as (for 70kg 154lb body weight without obesity, 0.125 mg 5000 IU a day) or recent extensive UV-B skin exposure, most people only have 5 to 25 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), which is made in the liver from vitamin D3. The immune system needs 50ng/mL (125nmol/L) or more to function properly - to mount full innate and adaptive responses to cancerous cells, viruses, bacteria and fungi and to reduce the chance of self-destructive inflammatory responses.
Inflammation is an indiscriminate cell destroying immune response primarily intended for multicellular parasites, such as intestinal worms (helminths). Our ancestors were ubiquitously infected with helminths, which long ago evolved compounds which downmodulate our inflammatory responses. The human immune response today evolved over millions of years to be overly-strong to counter this downmodulation. Now we are all dewormed, our inflammatory responses are overly-strong, with some people having genetic variations which gives them especially strong and inappropriately triggered inflammatory responses which cause psoriasis, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and the various neurodegenerative diseases.
Low 25(OH)D levels make this inflammation much worse. Many elderly people have only 1/10th to 1/4 of the circulating (25(OH)D) their immune systems need. So excessive, dysregulated, self-destructive, inflammation is easily triggered.
Annweiler et al. 2013 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad121432 report a strong relation between low 25(OH)D levels and AD. Only some of this would be due to the disease depleting the levels or reducing the person's exposure to UV-B light.
Ogura et al. 2021 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405650221000617 report that compared to healthy controls, whose 25(OH)D levels averaged 26.8ng/mL, Parkinson's disease (PD) sufferers averaged 13.4ng/mL and Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) sufferers averaged just 10.5ng/mL. PD, MSA and Dementia with Lewy Bodies are closely related, since they involve different patterns of misfolding of the alpha-synuclein protein (Ayers et al. 2022 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2113489119).
AD's etiology is somewhat different from that of PD/MSA/DLB but the details are unimportant from the point of view of prevention. What is needed is stronger innate and adaptive immune responses and especially better regulation of the inflammatory responses which are prone to being excessive, due to our lack of helminths. This requires at least 50ng/mL 25(OH)D, which most people can only be attain with proper vitamin D3 supplementation at levels above what most MDs think is required.
You won't read about this from drug companies, or from most professional researchers - whose goal must be to induce the funding of further research - since prevention (to a very large extent) of these neurodegenerative diseases involves better nutrition, especially regarding vitamin D, omega 3 fatty acids, magnesium and probably boron. To many MDs and PhDs, this sounds impossibly simple, but it is true. This knowledge and approach to prevention leaves no place for them as highly qualified, highly paid, gladiators against an enormous and poorly understood threat to health.
The scarily large "5000 IU" vitamin D a day requirement for average weight adults people is a gram every 22 years. Pharma grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram ex-factory. There's no need for drugs or more research.
Please read the research articles concerning vitamin D, the immune system, sepsis, influenza, COVID-19, autoimmune diseases, autism and neurodegeneration cited at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .
About 14 years ago, I discovered vitamin D as a very useful additional supplement for my depression. Its effect on my depression is slightly different from my lexapro, and it makes a tremendous difference.
I had been taking 4000IU in winter, 3000IU in spring and fall, and 2000IU in summer. But one spring a few years ago, my doctor finally decided to check my D level (I suspect she was worried that I was taking too much), and she discovered that my D level was on the low end of normal. So she said that I should not drop down to 2000IU for the summer, and could even increase.
Presently, I take 5000IU in summer and 6000IU in winter. Every time I turn around I see another health aspect that has been found to be benefited by vitamin D. Including Covid.
Apparently, different people have different abilities to absorb D orally. I participated in an informal study my doctor was conducting after testing low like you did. She had me taking 10,000 IU for a month and then retested me. Didn't even move the needle. So she wrote me a prescription for 100,000 IU for a month and retested. That moved the needle for me, but it was still below where she said it was supposed to be. She did not want me to continue at that level - not sure why. I think I take 10k IU a day now and have for awhile.
I highly recommend you drop the SSRI. But slowly. And read "Anatomy of an Epidemic".
Lexapro has been literally a magic drug for me. I take a fairly small dose (10mg), and the effect on my depression (I started taking it in 2004) was instant. I'm not willing to take a risk with that result, especially having experienced the pain of living with untreated severe depression for decades.
But I know that SSRIs do not help everyone with depression. My daughter has yet to find one that helps her the way Lexapro helps me.
I'm not sure you have THE answer but your alternative explanation is certainly a better alternative than the masking of symptoms which appears to be the modus operandi of pharma and the medical schools which are now almost entirely in their grasp.
Very informative, Robin. Thanks.
Just by the luck of reading the right article at the right time I convinced my partner (and myself) to take up to 2000 IU of D3 a day, since what I had read was that patients having higher concentrations of D3 in their systems appeared to be doing much better against Covid than those who had less (this was early on in the pandemic). Not sure if it's helped us (though we seem to be less affected by colds etc..and never got Covid), but we're not letting go of it now.
When you look at a U.S. map of cancers/ disease... you see that multiple sclerosis is concentrated mainly in the northeast. I’ve always wondered if lack of sun /vitamin D played a role.
It isn't just in the U.S. I've seen maps of Europe that show it consistently more concentrated in the northern latitudes. Instead of seeing a vitamin D connection though, they typically postulate a "Germanic gene" for it.
I'm no scientist but my partner and I are definitely living a life that focuses on nutrition and food as medicine and a big focus on D3. Thank you for this I believe you have offered, as Bruce says below, certainly more alternative explanations than most scientists caught up in DRUGS have offered of late.
As a Biological Psychologist, I find this a very interesting story… However, it could be written about any number of scientific problems. In that sense, it's almost tautological. There are three factors at work here. First, people are people. We all live in a subjective world of belief systems that are very hard to change. If anyone — including a scientist — has a particular worldview (for instance, amyloid plaques are the sole cause of Alzheimer's), it is extremely difficult to change that point of view. Sometimes it's impossible. Think about the people who believe that they are actually reptiles:
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/hallucinating-your-inner-trans-reptile
Second, the concluding comments are correct. It's probably not the case that Alzheimer's has one single cause because, quite frankly, Alzheimer's is a diagnostic category which includes a variety of neurological conditions whose symptomatologies are similar (https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/how-alzheimers-disease-diagnosed). Most people don't realize that. It's analogous to the category "autism", or any of the other dementias. So, there probably will never be a single, "cure" for the condition.
Finally, as the article points out, it's impossible to affect one aspect of brain function (for instance, synaptic stability), without affecting other aspects of brain function. There will always be biological trade-offs. That's just a fact of the way biology works. In fact, based on what I know from studying brains for a few decades, it may be the case that the most we can hope for is easing the cognitive decline as aging progresses.
In any event, thank you for a very enjoyable and informative read, Frederick
It’s not merely “tautological”. Why don’t auto mechanic providers or chemical manufacturers have so many useless products and services like medicine? Or computer manufacturers, on an industry-wide basis?
It’s the market, and the absence of one in the medical and educational fields. Socialism and fascism entrench people and institutions into a cartel. Mere lack of demand doesn’t sway them. They get taxes and Fed funny money. They get to ban competition.
Imagine a world where you could just start a business to cure or treat cancer. Would that be so bad? Whole groups of alternative doctors, insurance and private certifiers could arise in place of the cartel systems and “govermentalities”, to provide consumer education, fraud protection and safety. Let the bolder risk takers prove what works and what doesn’t. Let the meek go to their usual cartel providers. I guarantee we’d start to see real medicine being done then! It’s just that dang simple.
That is how it used to be until government, primarily federal, over-regulation derailed the system(s). For our own good of course (said sarcastically). My take is that regulatory services are subject to capture.
Both my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather died of the disease about the time the name, Alzheimer’s entered the vernacular. One during the 1970s and the other in 1980s. I thought they’d have a cure for my parents for sure! My mother died of it 7 years ago. I’m really hoping at 50, it’s not too late for me. Thank you for this thoughtful article.
Kate, your comment was heartbreaking and very brave. I offer a salute from someone facing dementia as well. I don't have a definite diagnosis yet, but I see the signs.
The article failed to mention what the alternate theories are. That would be interesting.
Please google Dale Brednesen. He mentions 36 possible mechanisms in cognitive decline.
I hope you are getting a complete neurological work up to see if you have something that is interfering with cognitive function and look into Bredneson's work who is affiliated with UCLA and the Buck Institute in California
My husband's maternal grandmother had a much longer death from Alzheimer's than is typical (farm-raised bodies are exceptionally sturdy), and I was seeing signs of the disease in his mom in her mid 60s before she died of other causes. I'm terrified of what this may mean for my husband as we reach our mid 50s.
I'm very sorry. No one volunteers for this. It is very hard. But there are resources to check out, such as Brednesen for preventive health, and Teepa Snow, for a more positive approach to understanding and helping people with dementia. It is possible to live each day as it comes and to make people understand I am still me, for as long as I can, and to help me family prepare and learn how to help. I am lucky. I found out (will find out) early and am able to prepare. And there are medical tests now to check for Alzheimers. Things have actually come a long way in terms of diagnosis. It is prevention and cure that haven't arrived (but see above).
I'm so sorry to hear it. I hope it's not that, but I also hope that whatever it is, you are able to face it bravely.
You are so right about alternate theories! Especially because I've not heard any dissent from the plaque model before.
In a lifetime of academics, the best lesson I ever learned was skepticism. The more history you read, the more you encounter experts at the highest level who were spectacularly wrong. And often accompanying the ignorance of life in the Ivory Towers is arrogance - they don't know, and they won't listen. An always-lethal pair. Question everything and never back down.
This post reminds me of the fertile mind of Gary Larson who produced a Far Side cartoon depicting a gang of "ruffian astronomers" or some such who monopolized all the time spent looking through the only available telescope by intimidating milder comrades. Humor succeeds when the essence is true and people who are trying to research this disease can obviously relate to what was humorously portrayed. Human nature doesn't change just because the people in question are highly educated and esteemed professionals (probably it is magnified). The power recently wielded by Frances and Fauci as the NIH and NAIAD heads because of their bottleneck control of almost ALL research funding is ruinous; both to their character and our institutions. This juxtaposes the brilliance of the checks and balances once capable of keeping our governance on track, and parallels what happens when those systems get short-circuited.
The two GOBLINS brought us to our knees!
My dad was diagnosed at age 52 back in 2000. At the time, I worked on Capitol Hill and immediately went to work researching and meeting with Pharma lobbyists and scientists who for sure would have something. We tried everything for my sweet dad, and after a few trials and a few useless drugs, decided to go off all of everything because the side effects were not worth it. He, and millions of others like him who have suffered the same end, are our heroes.
As I am a few years away from 50, I now worry I will meet the same end. We normal people don't understand why there hasn't been the promised breakthroughs, and attacking the hypothesized plaques from 22 years ago haven't made a difference.
Yet after the past three years where we have all publicly witnessed the complexities and biases within the FDA and government, and after we critical thinkers have been forced to look to alternative preventions and health treatments for this cold virus that has rocked our world, this article hints at the greater complexities of what the ALZ community faces. Could it be so sinister? It can't be ! A 'cabal' of researchers and big Pharma would sentence millions more to the same end by their refusal to entertain and promote any other ideas? Sounds too horrible to be true.
I wonder if ALZ is a type 3 diabetes. If inflammation has a larger role. Maybe we have been looking all a long down the wrong highway. Maybe it's more the body at its core: inflammation and trauma and how the body heals itself.
Thank you for this piece. If Big Pharma won't address, I suppose just like everything else these days, it will be up to us to find our own solutions and work together outside the mainstream. Sigh.
In honor of my dad.
Schizophrenia is another illness in which the "breakthrough" medications are variations of the same belief that manipulation of neurotransmitters will manage the illness. Nothing much has happened in 50 years and the side effects can be horrific.
"The Anatomy of an Epidemic" was very enlightening for me on the subject of neurotransmitters.
I’ve noticed many stories involve cowards in positions of leadership.