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The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis |  | Authors: Peter J. Whitehouse M.D., Daniel George M.Sc.
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 127370
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0312368178
Dewey Decimal Number: 616
EAN: 9780312368173
ASIN: 0312368178
Publication Date: December 9, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9780312368173 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
Dr. Peter Whitehouse will transform the way we think about Alzheimer’s disease. In this provocative and ground-breaking book he challenges the conventional wisdom about memory loss and cognitive impairment; questions the current treatment for Alzheimer’s disease; and provides a new approach to understanding and rethinking everything we thought we knew about brain aging.
The Myth of Alzheimer’s provides welcome answers to the questions that millions of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – and their families – are eager to know:
Is Alzheimer’s a disease?
What is the difference between a naturally aging brain and an Alzheimer’s brain?
How effective are the current drugs for AD? Are they worth the money we spend on them?
What kind of hope does science really have for the treatment of memory loss? And are there alternative interventions that can keep our aging bodies and minds sharp?
What promise does genomic research actually hold?
What would a world without Alzheimer’s look like, and how do we as individuals and as human communities get there?
Backed up by research, full of practical advice and information, and infused with hope, THE MYTH OF ALZHEIMER’S will liberate us from this crippling label, teach us how to best approach memory loss, and explain how to stave off some of the normal effects of aging.
“I don’t have a magic bullet to prevent your brain from getting older, and so I don’t claim to have the cure for AD; but I do offer a powerful therapy—a new narrative for approaching brain aging that undercuts the destructive myth we tell today. Most of our knowledge and our thinking is organized in story form, and thus stories offer us the chief means of making sense of the present, looking into the future, and planning and creating our lives. New approaches to brain aging require new stories that can move us beyond the myth of Alzheimer’s disease and towards improved quality of life for all aging persons in our society. It is in this book that your new story can begin." -Peter Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D.
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| Customer Reviews:
Brain Aging and 'A Disease of the Century' July 16, 2009
John Thorndike (Athens, OH United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
First a complaint: the book is repetitious. The first fifty pages, in particular, could have been cut by half, as the authors' central message is repeated, and repeated again.
Nonetheless, that message is vivid and germane for anyone looking after someone whose brain is under attack--or simply aging, as Peter Whitehouse and his cohort Daniel George put it. I only wish I'd read The Myth of Alzheimer's when I was taking care of my father in the last year of his life. My father's diagnosis, a common one I'm sure, was "Advanced second-stage dementia, most likely caused by Alzheimer's." I think Whitehouse's book would have confirmed my own instincts: that medications were unlikely to be of much help to my father, and that my job was to care for him, allowing him as much dignity as I could offer and as much warmth as he'd accept. He was prescribed Aricept and I gave it to him, but it seemed a frail defense against a powerful tide of memory loss and confusion.
As Whitehouse puts it, most people in the Alzheimer's empire know that "there is no singular disease called `AD,' and that it is a complex, scientifically imprecise social construct that may never be cured." And because of this, we would do better to focus our efforts on enlightened care than to pour all our money and attention into finding a cure for this little-understood disease--if indeed Alzheimer's is a disease at all, rather than simply an effect of brain aging.
In the last three decades, establishing cognitive deterioration and disability in the elderly as a disease, rather than the result of a natural process, has been vital to both researchers and drug companies. As Whitehouse explains it, "In order for their research to be taken seriously by those who controlled the public coffers, it was clear that their efforts had to be targeted at something other than the vague process of aging. Their work had to be focused on something real and immediate, something awesome and imminent--a specific disease worthy of massive research efforts into its cause and cure, a `disease of the century.'"
It helps, when making these charges, that Whitehouse is clear about his own role through the eighties and nineties, as one of those neuroscientists who embraced and formulated Alzheimer's as a disease, almost as a plague. He has since seen the light, and is extremely persuasive about it. There is much science and clear history in this book, and a great deal of common sense, as well. We have been sold, he claims, a dire vision of dementia, with the promise of an eventual cure--yet in thirty years we have made almost no progress toward that cure. What we need to do, Whitehouse explains, is take care of patients with cognitive decline, and keep them as involved in the world as possible. Our bodies break down and our minds break down, and there is much we simply have to live with. We can keep studying the problem of dementia, but in the meantime there are patients to be looked after.
Informative and Helpful July 4, 2009
T. Starr
For anyone interested in knowing the truth about Alzheimer's disease, this is the book to read. You will not only learn a great deal about the history and current understanding of the nature of the disease, but you will also learn how the medical profession has wrongly diagnosed this dreaded disease. The most important part of the book--the last one third--provides details about how we can change the way we live in order to maintain healthy brains and thereby extend their useful life. A groundbreaking approach to truly understanding the nature of brain aging.
Changed My Outlook on my Mother's battle April 27, 2009
Marigold (San Diego, CA USA)
The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded DiagnosisThis book totally changed my outlook on my mother's life. Dr. Whitehouse explains what is truly happening and what we can probably expect. Medicines are discussed as well as the future of 'Alzheimer's Disease'. I highly recommend this book for anyone involved in this disease.
Fabulous Book about Alzheimer's! March 3, 2009
Patricia A. Hoon (Lafaayette, IN)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful resource for those whose loved ones have been diagnosed with the "A" word. It puts life back into perspective and shows how the loved one can still have a meaningful life and enjoy family relationships. I think caregivers will be encouraged, also, by Dr. Whitehouse's perspective as an experienced geriatric neurologist and researcher, that life is not over because the brain is aging in different ways, although there will be new challenges. I highly recommend it.
 Viewpoint of a patient January 12, 2009
Loella F. Niles
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis
This review is the inside viewpoint of an 86 year old retired engineer who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It is very helpful in exlaining the very things I am experiencing, in a reasonable understandable manner. It is clear in explaining that it starts out with no symptoms and inexorably progresses. I am very aware of problems, but also pleased that I can still do math althouigh very slowly.
The title is misleading, as it leads one tho think that the disorder itself is mythical, which was the viewpoint of the kind social worker who recommended the book to me. She was really shocked when I showed her a photograph of an autopsied brain, much reduced in size with a hole in the middle. Also when she saw my own report - "cerebral and cerebellar volume loss". Pretty straight forward.
Actually the author's point is that he feels the problem is actually the effect of normal aging, not a disease or disorder in itself. And the very word "Alzheimer's" ia so scary that it should not be used. He's got a point. He makes it clear in the book on page 36. "Thus, the onset of age-relate conditions such as brain aging appears to be part of the 'normal' sequence of events that take place after we have reached an age whwn we can no longer reproduce and fulfill our evolutionary purpose." He continiues "It would actually be quite abnormal for someone not to have increasing memory challenges in their seventies, eighties, and beyond". That makes me feel much better, I have not ben singled out.
I have recommended the book to my family and friends as a somewhat comforting explanation.
I have only one bone to pick with the book. After 100 years of medical experience with a problem that could be actuall diagnosed only by autopsy, there is now a research and medical procedure called "PET scan" (Positron Emissions Testing" which is available to patients and is covered by Medi-Care. To me, it represented immense relief to actually know the answer.
By the way, Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Apparently it gobbles up us left overs who didn't get cancer or auto accidents which are much more common.
Prof Donald E. Niles
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