I read in the paper that today a hundred years ago Dr Alois Alzheimer presented the first case, a woman in her 50s (like Anna then), who was so restless and confused that her doctors prescribed warm baths and when that didn’t work, chloroform.
The health editor of The Independent, Jeremy Laurance, put s the case succinctly. ‘It strips people of their memory, their personality, and eventually their humanity. It is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is incurable and irreversible.’
Advances in medicine over a hundred years have passed Alzheimer’s by. The article goes on to give the usual advice, eat fruit and vegetables, take exercise and keep mentally active. Even nicotine now is supposed to help. Well Anna did those things and she smoked. The article also had photographs of Harold Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Ronald Regan and Charlton Heston. I think they also did most of the things on the list.
Let’s face it, no-one knows.
The article listed memory, personality, humanity.
Anna has certainly lost most of her memory. Her personality ? I am worrying about that, about her passivity at this time - but she only has to laugh and you know it is not all lost. Her humanity? Why is that on the list? She has not lost her humanity. What would that mean? What are clinical signs of loss of humanity?
After a hundred years, Anna is still in the waiting room to be treated.
There are social signs of loss of humanity, eg bad old stories of back wards in institutions of demented patients left to stink in their own urine and excrement. We hope we would not tolerate that now. But meanwhile anti-dementia drugs are not value, it has been decided, while anti-psychotic drugs are, apparently – this is the progress we have made in a hundred years from warm baths, and if they don’t work, give them chloroform …. A social model of dementia should help us to distinguish by now what is to do with the disease and what is to do with social responses to the disease. - see Tom Kitson (Dementia Reconsidered, OUP, 1997, reprinted 1998 (twice), 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 (twice) , 2005, 2006 … )