March, 1998

 Supplement to THE NATURAL MEDICINE NEWSLETTER, Vol. 2,

No. 2, March, '98. Tucson: Nutritional & Metabolic TeleMedicine.

The Good News about Alzheimer's Disease

by John V. DOMmisse, MD, FRCPC

 Alzheimer's Disease is the brain condition in which older people increasingly lose their memory, personality and eventually even the ability to take care of their daily hygiene and other normal functions. Actually, the term Alzheimer's Disease was originally reserved for the similar condition that, very rarely, starts in middle age and has a more rapid course before the patient dies. The more common age of onset is in the seventh and eightth decades of life, and the term for that was supposed to be Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (SDAT) or, more simply, Alzheimer's dementia. However, as so often happens, wide public use of the incorrect term eventually becomes the acceptable term, since it has become entrenched by common use. Affecting 3 million Americans, hardly any of us are unfamiliar with it, having usually witnessed it in at least one elderly family-member. ['Dementia' is the term applied to any illness that results in the loss of the memory, thinking ability and individuality of the personality. If the cause of the dementia is known the dementia is called by that name, e.g., vitamin B12 deficiency dementia; if no cause is known or proven, it is called idiopathic or Alzheimer's dementia.]

 With all the negative publicity about this increasingly-common condition, few people may be aware that there are several physicians - mostly nutritionally- and naturally-oriented - in the US who have had great success in preventing it, and even reversing it if caught early enough. [Even if the dementia may originally have been caused by a nutritional or hormonal deficiency or imbalance, once it reaches a certain stage of advancement, the brain-cells are dead and nothing can be done to revive them.] There is even a book written by Tom Warren, a layperson, that documents how he refused to accept the bad prognosis for this condition when it was first diagnosed in him. He studied nutrition, environmental toxicity, and allergies, and applied what he learned in his own diet and health-care - and cured himself of this terrible affliction!

 I am proud to count myself among the few physicians who have also studied the nutritional factors and other forms of natural healing of this condition, and applied this knowledge in their medical practices. There are hundreds of articles about this subject in the conventional medical literature (only a few are referenced in this brief supplement), and I have read and applied virtually all of them in my practice, starting in Portsmouth, Virginia in the early 1980's and continuing here in Tucson since 1994. The way in which I have reached this point is by ordering blood-tests to detect the vitamin, mineral and hormone deficiencies and imbalances that can cause dementia, and then correcting these imbalances with the correct doses of the correct supplements, confirmed by repeat blood-tests. Not a single one of the scores of middle-aged-to-elderly people who have consulted me since 1981 for memory-loss or early Alzheimer's dementia - and who stayed on my program - has ever gone on to develop the full-blown Alzheimer's Disease.

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