So When Do We Get Real? HUH!!!

There we were, creekside. The water was raging with spring run-off. We all ardently watched the water’s turmoil. No one watched the toddler with us. All of a sudden the little guy wasn’t there. We heard his scream. We looked and saw him foundering out in the swift moving water of the creek.

Oh My God we said, all of us in unison. Gary is gone, what should we do? I’ll dive in and save him said Darrel. Darlene his wife said no way you will be killed too. Matt said he would get his canoe off the car and save Gary with that. Charlie said no, there is no time to untie it, haul it down to the shore and get if. Gary will be blocks away by then if still alive.

I couldn’t believe this. More suggestions were made, discussion of these alternatives ensued. We were all engaged in the arguing none of us taking any action to save Gary. Certainly one of us could have jumped into the car, gone down to the foot bridge and waited for Gary and pulled him out there. We all knew the bridge was there very close to the water, low enough to reach down and snag Gary.

Did we do it? No we were too busy arguing about the right choice as Gary passed under the bridge and was found days later far from it lying on the creek bottom lodged by a large stone. He was hooked in the dragging done to find the little boy’s body.

How could we being so bright spend our time arguing how to save him, when doing it was so very simple?

The plague of Dementia which Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is one or more forms of dementia is in a cloud passing over us right now. And the cloud is dropping rain laced with the Dementia germ. It is spreading exponentially through our populace. It is growing in numbers who have it. It is reaching epidemic proportions and still growing.

It is the toddler who fell in the water and drowned as we argued how to save him. We are doing the exact same thing with the Epidemic of Dementia now quickly building soon to engulf us then bankrupt us. The numbers are there, they are real it would be redundant for me to repeat them.

This essay is about a recent article first appearing in My Health News Daily entitled New Alzheimer's Criteria Would Change Diagnosis for Millions. It is in my Archive, click on the title to go there and read it.

The article tells us this:

Almost everyone currently diagnosed with a mild form of Alzheimer's disease would be downgraded to not having the condition, if new proposed criteria for the diagnosis of cognitive problems were applied, a new study shows.

Instead, people diagnosed as having "very mild" and "mild" Alzheimer's disease would be reclassified as having mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which is currently recognized as an intermittent stage between the normal loss of mental function that comes with age and the development of dementia.

This can be argued as both good and bad but gets us nowhere, the toddler remains at risk with nothing being done to save him. If Early Stage is no longer AD, no longer Dementia, is rather a mild thinking impairment that could be part of the process of aging or part of the process of leading to Dementia, trust nothing will be done to help while a person is in that stage.

If anything this change in classification removes the horrific stereotype of a person who has AD!

I started this essay with the title: So When Do We Get Real? HUH!!!. Getting real is accepting the numbers for what they are and what they will do. Then it is doing something about them rather than arguing with each other about what to do. That is happening now.

·       Too many of the Pros say nothing can be done. Keep them safe, when you can no longer do that, put ‘em in the nursing home.

·       Something happened on the way to the nursing home, then filtered down to assisted living homes, home care and day care. 65-70% of the nursing homes are owned and run by for profit corporations. “For Profits” tend to be chains big box systems in which care is homogenized to one way fits all for whatever reason they are there. They are big, pretty and they pack lots of drugs to keep the inmates soporized (a new word that describes the after effects of soporifics aka high potency tranquilizing-doping drugs!)  

·       It is useful to use these statistics predicting the coming epidemic to scare the socks of folks to contribute to find the cure.

·       Taking the milder forms of AD, (The Early Stage of Dementia where we remain functional) out of the AD classification is perhaps politically motivated to excuse the absence of help for anyone but Fund Raisers and Drug Companies as it now is. When Dementia of any kind is let to go too far in its debilitating development it will take something like Magic to cure it.

The toddler is in the water, it is rushing downstream, soon to drown. It will drown if no one takes action to save it.

We need to quit arguing for priority and start dealing with reality. Something can be done short of magic and that is treatment, therapy and programs designed to keep the so called folks with Mild Cognitive Impairment (CMI) functioning and out of the orbit of need presented by the cost inflated services amalgamated by the sleight of hand of Banks, Wall Street and Big Government.