THE RANDLE REPORT

WHAT IS ‘ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE’?

Labelling individuals with a handy catch-all ‘condition’ is rife across all branches of pharmaceutical medicine.

Any such labelling settles the ‘diagnosis’ for the practitioner and establishes a text-book character for the person so-labelled.

It does not assist in understanding the problems of the individual, since, in a single move, it dispenses with individuality. A person with blood sugar irregularities becomes a representative ‘diabetic’ and joins the treadmill of prescribed drugs and activities regardless of personality or humanity.

An individual’s health issues are a tiny part of them - in fact are something other than them altogether. Medical ‘health professionals’ put people in a box which suggests it is all they are.

If someone has a psychotic event and is taken in a plain van to a facility that claims to deal with schizophrenia, he or she will be labelled a ‘schizophrenic’. Like other psychiatric ‘conditions’, there is no real definition or test for the application of this or any other label.

Because psychiatry is a vacuous pretend-science whose origins are in control and violence, it has no understanding of the mind and life and no cures, even for its own made-up conditions.

Alzheimer’s ‘disease’ was named after a psychiatrist. Alois Alzheimer observed what he believed to be ‘pre-senile dementia’ in one of his ‘patients’

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Dementia, as the word suggests, refers to the idea of losing mental capacity, although it doesn’t involve any reference to the increase or maintenance of mental capacity that must have preceded it, and could, theoretically, succeed it. Actually, it breaks down to just another label with no consistent definition or diagnosis, if only because you can’t diagnose the mind by physical means. So the application of the damning label can be based on failing to satisfy questions to which the person never knew the answer anyway.

Alzheimer’s ‘disease’ was named after him by his psychiatric colleague, Kraepelin, the king of labellers who invented psychiatric conditions for a living, and set the scene for the poisonous collusion between psychiatry and pharma that blights us today.

What Alzheimer did with his unique patient was to cut her body up after her passing and find some features of her brain that he could correlate with the woman’s eccentric behaviour. In this kind of ‘science’, correlation and cause are pretty much interchangeable.

Essentially, the term ‘Alzheimer’s’ refers to ‘dementia’ occurring prior to ‘senility’, and is especially misused when referring to those deemed old enough to become demented anyway(!). ‘Old’, ‘not so old’, and ‘old enough’ are all vague and indefinable, of course, unless they, too, are arbitrarily classified.

Since psychiatry has no understanding of the cause or cure for anything, there is no positive value in the labelling process, while a serious negative aspect is that friends and relatives of the labelled begin to see them as a ‘condition’ rather than a person.

One of the main signs people look out for in themselves and others of the onset of this mysterious and ill-defined affliction is the inability to find the word for things. This is described as memory loss, but I have asked people who have been labelled with the condition whether they can visualise the thing they can’t name. This was hardly a scientific study, but on each occasion they said they could do so. So there was no memory problem involved, merely a difficulty in accessing the correct  word or ‘symbol’ to communicate it to others.

Another ‘symptom’ is what is described as no ‘short term memory’ in people who can recall every moment of their young lives.

It seems to me that people are aware and interested in things around them in their youth and middle age, but gradually (as a generality) take less notice as they become ‘set in their ways’ and take their surroundings for granted. Why, then, would earlier memories be more vivid? Because they were more ‘there’ to record them. Can’t remember breakfast? Did you notice it at the time? If you didn’t record it, you can’t replay it.

Try some exercises in doing what you’re doing when you’re doing it, rather than thinking about something else or dwelling in some past time. I suggest you will be able to recall it later. The more you are there in the present, the better able you will be to recall the recent past.

It’s a full time job believing in the ‘reality’ we all share. ‘Demented’ people lose the power to participate before their bodies wear out. In an effort to ‘hold on’ to that reality, they will regress to a time when it was more real.

If people are having difficulty with perception, the single worst thing you can do is to drug them into a stupor. The confusion can only be magnified and the ability to hold on to the illusion shared by the rest of us further reduced. The only, albeit understandable, reason for drugging people is for the relief of others. It saves some inconvenience and embarrassment, and it also gives the illusion that they are ‘at peace’.

Again, from my limited experience, agitation comes from the sense of needing to live up to a standard that is no longer applicable. Relatives want their old mum back. Others are testing for signs of  ‘forgetting’ and weirdness. If the changes are accepted with good humour and inabilities glossed over, the atmosphere can be light and the affected person can even find it all funny rather than tragic. It doesn’t matter at all if what the person says is non sequitur, or a different version than everyone else remembers. If you need reassurance that you’re right, the problem is yours rather than theirs.

All generalities are false, including any I have used here. The ‘disease’ is a catch-all. No two people are alike and, convenient as it would be for practitioners, no two people have the same symptoms or reactions. A statement I have heard that ‘they don’t know who you are’ is based on no practical reality. Individuals sometimes recognise friends and relatives and sometimes don’t show any evidence of having done so. The presence of somebody who cares about them and touches them kindly can only help and any emotion that comes to the surface, such as grief, is better out than in, especially while no one can gauge what emotions are taking place without external demonstration. Crying and laughter are both emotional releases.

People of previous generations lived with a lot of different challenges than those facing us today. While the major threats that assail our bodies these days are chemicals and electrical disturbances, they were better suited to handling now eradicated germs and diseases. Their nutrition, despite the presence of sugar and (much less chemicalised) cigarette smoke, was more healthy and natural, as well as being seasonal and local.

Society now, in general, and especially as regards the ‘elderly’ is more medicalised than at any time in history. Vast numbers of people are on repeat prescriptions for cocktails of, often conflicting, medical concoctions, all of which place demands on the body and perception of their users.

If there is one likely cause to be identified for the epidemic increase in so-called ‘dementia’ - or whatever you want to call the phenomenon - it is this monumental escalation of drug use, which had its origins in the early part of the twentieth century and whose emergence correlates in a way that would convince anyone, other than the drug combines who have reaped the spectacular financial benefits, that numbing and dumbing symptoms must have the cumulative effect of obliterating consciousness.