Rewiring My Brain and Stepping into Alzheimer's World

Once you start to understand how things work in Alzheimer's World you get calm and comfortable. Once you get calm and comfortable you give off a better "vibe" to someone that has Alzheimer's.

By Bob DeMarco
Alzheimer's Reading Room

I would find a new way to communicate with my mother who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

I wrote that on my da Vinci pad in 2004. This was at the same time I was coming to another conclusion, something had to change and that something was me.

I did not perceived the changes in communication as being difficult. After all, I had been studying communication and decision making all the way back to college days, and ever since. I figured some practice and I would get the hang of it.

What I did not immediately perceive was how difficult it would be to change all the things I had learned over the course of my life.

For example, I had to learn how NOT to feel bad when my mother said something mean spirited to me.

LIFESTYLE CHANGES AND MUSIC AS ALZHEIMER’S THERAPY?

Can either exercise, or healthy diet, or mental activities, or socialization, or music

be used as a therapy to treat people living with Alzheimer’s?

By Wantland J. Smith
Alzheimer's Reading Room

This Man Decided to Fight Alzheimer's
-- Jay Smith

I think each of these “lifestyle” strategies should be adopted as an urgent priority as a matter of public health and national survival. But, even if the potential benefits were to become widely accepted, I acknowledge that their effectiveness will ultimately depend upon the extent of people’s willingness to commit to doing the therapy persistently.

But wait a minute! No one is promoting using these lifestyle prevention strategies as a treatment regimen. Nonetheless, I am beginning to, at least for myself, after living with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s for a long time – six years since my diagnosis of “early Alzheimer’s disease,” and more than a dozen years since the first symptoms became worrisome enough that I sought a neurological workup to try to find out what was causing them.

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