Memory Loss--Not Natural to Aging?
When I taught high school and would forget something, the students mercilessly tagged me with having Alzheimer's. Who knows? Maybe I was having an Alzheimer's moment. But it's not just kids who extrapolate tidbits from the news about older people or what it means to overlook or forget or why someone overlooks or forgets, it's also other adults who believe the propaganda about the mental health of others, and in particular older people. Turns out that older people are not at any greater risk of memory loss than younger people. But the fact that we're told that there is we believe it because, well, when we're 27 we may not interact with many 85 year olds on a daily basis to test their memory. People's memory will surprise you. It's always surprised me. When I was in college I had to memorize the titles, the authors, the dates, the first lines, and the theme of over 80 poems for an end-of-the-year English final. I aced it. Because I studied for it. I used flash cards and drilled myself endlessly for three days prior to the test to where I could think of nothing else or wanted to. Then there is other information, like Los Angeles Dodger's 1969 team rosters. I could rattle off names, numbers, positions, and some distinctive offensive or defensive strength of the player, whether he batted right or left, and whether or not he was a star or not. Other folks have tremendous memories, memorizing entire lines of computer code or algorithms. I am not up to that feat. But plenty of young folks today are. So watch out.
When I taught high school and would forget something, the students mercilessly tagged me with having Alzheimer's. Who knows? Maybe I was having an Alzheimer's moment. But it's not just kids who extrapolate tidbits from the news about older people or what it means to overlook or forget or why someone overlooks or forgets, it's also other adults who believe the propaganda about the mental health of others, and in particular older people. Turns out that older people are not at any greater risk of memory loss than younger people. But the fact that we're told that there is we believe it because, well, when we're 27 we may not interact with many 85 year olds on a daily basis to test their memory. People's memory will surprise you. It's always surprised me. When I was in college I had to memorize the titles, the authors, the dates, the first lines, and the theme of over 80 poems for an end-of-the-year English final. I aced it. Because I studied for it. I used flash cards and drilled myself endlessly for three days prior to the test to where I could think of nothing else or wanted to. Then there is other information, like Los Angeles Dodger's 1969 team rosters. I could rattle off names, numbers, positions, and some distinctive offensive or defensive strength of the player, whether he batted right or left, and whether or not he was a star or not. Other folks have tremendous memories, memorizing entire lines of computer code or algorithms. I am not up to that feat. But plenty of young folks today are. So watch out.
The following article on memory loss is by Natural News staff writer, David Gutierrez. The headline gives you what you need. The contents of the article are not that great. He explains that memory loss is not age-related condition, but the result of brain damage. I am always a skeptic, which I guess gave rise to this blog in the first place. I work on percentages. Most people don't. They hear brain damage and are consumed by fear. Or they hear AIDS and want to throw themselves under a bus. Put that off for another time. Work in percentages. Scientists do. So do good doctors. If a person has HIV, you have to ask yourself what the percentages are of the virus advance on healthy cells. What's the ratio of healthy cells to sick ones? 80/20? Same thing with brain damage. What part of the brain is damaged, and how much of the brain is damaged? What is the percentage? Even with these statistics, these only serve doctors in the accuracy or proximation of their diagnosis. I would take every doctor diagnosis with a grain of salt. The whole reason that we color their diagnosis as authoritative is because we're taught to. Applying the concept of percentages, we're more likely to increase the percentage of certainty in a doctor's diagnosis when we know nothing about organ function or how it interacts with other organs or what our medical or biochemical history is or how nutrition mediates any condition. Medical history is riddled with horror stories of people dying from the wrong diagnosis or a diagnosis mistreated. I knew of a woman who was admitted to the hospital because her reproductive organ was bleeding. The admitting ER doctor thought that she may have pneumonia and ordered her a room. He ordered her a room because she had great health insurance. So the initial diagnosis was pneumonia and the treatment was antibiotics. Antibiotics? For pneumonia? Drip. Drip. Drip. For 10 days. Technician after technician wheeled their holy hardware into her room as if they were auditioning. They would conduct a heart exam and show the woman on her back in the hospital bed what the monitor was doing. But she didn't know what it meant. She wasn't trained to read it, let alone interpret the data. No follow-up. Never heard from that cardiologist again. Then the woman was given a breathing test. The technician commented that her breathing was pretty good. I asked, "I thought that she has pneumonia?" "You'll have to check with her doctor" came the retort. Well, where the hell was the doctor! So we got no valuable information. Oh, we got information alright, but no integrated information that could either confirm or deny the initial diagnosis of pneumonia. All we got . . . no, excuse me . . . all she got were orders for more tests. "To really find out what is going on in her lungs, we'll need to conduct a CT scan." So the mindless and immoral orderlies transferred her to a mobile bed and wheeled her down the cold hall into an elevator that took her down to the radiation lab in the basement. I held her hand the whole time. Her eyes were fixed on mine consoling her fear and suspending the reality and the inevitability of these days and hours being the remaining few she has in this life and what my role in them was. Was I enabling the whole process? Was I guarding against the monstrous robots who'd surrendered their powers to question for a few bucks, the altruistic psychopaths? It was clear to me that each player knew his role. They were all just following doctor's orders. No one stopped to ask. "She was 89" they rationalized and "She was up there in years" came the reassurances. Family members too saw the truth of such statements and could not muster the courage or enough self-possession to tell the government-trained doctors to go to hell. The orderlies, the woman in the bed, and I waited for a minute in the hall for the patient already in the radiation lab to exit. The door opened, and on her bed out she rolled. The orderlies steering the litter made of chrome, cotton, and rubber waited patiently before they rolled her inside the room. Sitting at the center of the room, like a lasered Moloch, was the CT scan with intersecting red beams thin as string and transparent as light. The red lights intersected like the site at the end of the barrel of a rifle. The woman lying in the mobile bed, who just a minute before was making self-effacing jokes to allay the general fears and anxieties, raised herself up by gripping my arm as if with new strength and begged in earnest, "Mike! Get me out of here!" Her soul flushed with fear, she whispered in panic "I don't want to do this!" The technician came over to reassure her and me of the harmless nature of the electronic portal. I told the technician that I want to put the choice over what gets done to her body in her hands as much as possible. He pressed me, insisting that the risks were low. Perhaps. If that were true, then why was his station in a closed booth insulated from any radiation? The woman begged again. And I told the doctor we were leaving. On the stroll back, it pleased me that the woman was relieved and a bit scared for having survived the orders belonging to some anonymous and soulless monster. Clearly, we could have found out who ordered the CT scan. Easy enough. I am sure it was her doctor. But we were not told. We never were told anything. Information did not flow to the family. Learning the rationale for the order may have proved even more difficult given the fact that the doctor was busy in his own office during the day with his own patients. Had the doctor exhausted all his other options for discovering the cause of her ill health or for seeing whether his initial diagnosis, like a best guess, was accurate? One has to wonder how much of the diagnostic hardware is used to fund this or that procedure. Imagine if that woman had proceeded with the CT scan. What would it have found that her doctor could use against her to convince her of another procedure, maybe four or five or more procedures. I had a neighbor once who was diabetic. She had diabetic wounds on her feet. Her doctor cut a toe off. Snip. Snip. Snip. She returned home only to find out six months later that the infection, which the surgery was supposed to curtail, re-emerged. And what do you think his recommendation was? That's right . . . Snip. Snip. Snip. Half a foot this time. I mean he really wanted to get that nasty infection, right? She went home. Few months later, foot gets infected again. Snip. Snip. Snip. One foot--gone! I will spare you the details on that woman's life, except to say that the last time that I saw her in her wheel chair both of her legs were cut to their knees. All to go after that darn infection. And that infection is treated like a terrorist, wherein the doctor has to operate in order to prevent greater health calamities for the woman. Pcychopathic altruists says it best.
Back to the woman with the pneumonia.
Once the doctor and the hospital staff learned that she was refusing tests, there was no more reason to treat her. She was put on a daily regime of antibiotics called Rosin. Drip. Drip. Drip. That antibiotics robbed her of the natural gut flora that kept her well, that fought infection naturally. I'd heard later that garlic is the best natural antibiotic. But she remained in the hospital for an additional seven days while the family remained in suspended disbelief. No information, nothing of value or pertinence was transmitted to me or any other family member. Her last three days in the hospital were spent in transition care where the antibiotics flowed. Drip. Drip. Drip. At one point the woman claimed aloud that she was losing her mind. She arrived home after ten days in the hospital never having the initial diagnosis confirmed, never having been offered an alternate treatment besides the Rosin. That is a standard antibiotic a friend explained. Though she was sent home after ten days, the woman was given a hospital bed to lie in. It was placed in the front room. That night we tried to restore her, give her some saturated fats, like coconut butter. She asked me, and I will never forget this, "Mike, what did they do to me?"
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(NaturalNews) Although the conventional wisdom would have us believe that people's memories naturally deteriorate as they get older, age-related memory loss is not found in all cultures around the world.
Indeed, new research suggests that all memory loss is a sign of brain damage, even in patients who are not suffering from clinical dementia. In a study published in 2010, researchers from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago gave 350 Catholic clergy members yearly memory tests for 13 years, then scanned their brains after death. They found that the brains of patients who died without ever experiencing memory loss showed no signs of Alzheimer's disease or strokes. Based on this data, the researchers suggested that all memory loss is a sign of brain damage, most likely early-stage dementia. "What we're saying is the brain changes that are mainly responsible for Alzheimer's and other dementias also seem to be mainly responsible for very mild early changes in memory and thinking," researcher Robert S. Wilson said. |
