As a nurse and then as a physician, I saw many people who did not get well from their health care. It seemed that once they had a "disease" it was only time until nothing was left for medicine to do. That was one reason palliative care came to medicine's rescue; it was the last one thing medicine could do.
When my dad had reached that end of his lung cancer in 2004 and was told they were moving him into palliative care, his comment was, "is that all there is?" Even he knew.
Earlier in 1968 during rounds on the nursing care of a patient, I asked my nursing instructor if anyone had ever gone back thru medical manuals that generations past had kept, seeing if they had any therapies we could try. I continued to lament the futility of current care. She cajoled me and said perhaps I, one day, could look into that but for now this was all we had. "All we had!" This scenario happened over and over in my medical career.
I felt as if Chicken Little's sky just fell upon certain people condemning them to a disease with no end in sight and no way of knowing where it came from. I felt that if we knew where it came from, perhaps we could begin to really prevent diseases.
It wasn't until 1999 when I took Dr. Jeffery Bland's Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Medicine program that I realized that I had found a like-minded person and philosophy.
It made so much more sense because, by then, I had become an Osteopathic physician. I believed in A.T Still's philosophy that the body as a whole was perfect and given to its own, would continue to be perfect. Diseases come and go but how your genetics, epigenetics, lifestyles interfaced with that disease determined your "fate".
Today, because of decoding the genome and the applications of AI, we are learning so much more about how health and diseases fit together! Our treatments are getting better and someday we will get there; but not today.
Today we are too concerned about the monetization of medicine by the few to the many.
In order for us to truly understand one another, let's put the following information into context, and start with just what is "Functional Medicine", because it is a paradigm shift.
I now have lived long enough to come to the conclusion that every generation is plagued by some major disease process. My father's generation had to deal with lung cancer from smoking. My mom, being 9 years younger than my dad (this age difference was common in post-war marriages), had to deal with dementia. Since her death in 2015, for two years from 2020 and 2021 infections due to COVID-19 took the lead in causes of death. In 2024, we have now returned to heart disease and cancer as first and second cause of death. Dementia takes the sixth leading cause of death in 2024 and presently seems to have the energy to rise in the ranks of "leading causes of death" in the very near future. So, we better figure this out and quick. You, setting there reading this, I'm talking about your future. So, let's get started before it is too late!
Dementia is one of those new words added to medicine. In the past, people just didn't live as long as we are living today. Now they may have gone "bonkers" or perhaps were possessed but Dementia? The world was too clean back then. Pollution and Bio-Hazards weren't a thing. We lived more outdoors than in. Today the medical community with all of its technologies is trying to break dementia down into its smallest part so as to better understand and control or eliminate it. We are closer to doing that today than when it first appeared in the 13th Century.
Abstract:
"The term dementia derives from the Latin root demens, which means being out of one's mind. Although the term "dementia" has been used since the 13th century, its mention in the medical community was reported in the 18th century. Even though the Greeks postulated a cerebral origin, the concept was not restricted to senile dementia and included all sorts of psychiatric and neurological conditions leading to psychosocial consequences. In the 19th century, individuals with dementia were recognized as patients, deserving medical care from specialists called alienists, and senile dementia became a medical disease. Subsequently, progresses in neuropathology allowed its fragmentation into different neuropathological conditions. Senile dementia was considered as a distinct entity from Alzheimer's seminal case published in 1906, and was first attributed to a vascular origin. However, from the late 1960s and for 20 subsequent years, Alzheimer's disease became the prototypical senile dementia. Only recently, the term dementia was abandoned for major neurocognitive disorder and the heterogeneity of the syndrome acknowledged again at the phenotypical and molecular levels. We hope a better understanding of this fascinating history will improve scientific research and impose humility towards the complex underpinnings of age-related cognitive decline."(1)
(1) Assal F. History of Dementia. Front Neurol Neurosci. 2019;44:118-126. doi: 10.1159/000494959. Epub 2019 Apr 30. PMID: 31220848.
It is so important that you get an Allopathic (Traditional Medicine) diagnosis first because some of these dementias are more severe than others. Making the right diagnosis is the groundwork for everything you do from there on and you do not want this to be wrong!
Once you know its name, then you can follow and compare Allopathic and Functional Medicines teachings, therapies, outcomes etc.
This might be a bit harder because you need to find someone that knows how to apply Dr. Bredesen Protocols or is well versed in Functional Medicine Protocols for each of the different types of Dementia.
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We got ourselves into this mess by thinking that we were the world, and we could do anything with no consequences; but we have found out that we are of this world and we need to pay attention to more than just climate. But that topic is for another day.
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No pun intended.
