NYT, July 13, 2010 – “Rules Seek to Expand Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s“:
If the guidelines are adopted in the fall, as expected, some experts predict a two to threefold increase in the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
The new guidelines include criteria for three stages of the disease: preclinical disease, mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease and, lastly, Alzheimer’s dementia.
Under the new guidelines, for the first time, diagnoses will aim to identify the disease as it is developing by using results from so-called biomarkers — tests like brain scans, M.R.I. scans and spinal taps that reveal telltale brain changes.
The changes could also help drug companies that are, for the first time, developing new drugs to try to attack the disease earlier. So far, there are no drugs that alter the course of the disease.
The trick to unraveling this con is to follow the money. In this case you, the mark, begin getting fleeced out of your most precious assets — your money and your sense of well-being — upon being diagnosed with “preclinical” Alzheimer’s as much as 10 years before you lose your keys!
Doctors, MRI manufacturers and operators, drug companies, and snake oil salesmen get richer.
You and other preclinical sufferers like you, get poorer, even as you begin a pill-popping life as a prisoner condemned to an ignominious death without possibility of pardon.
This con is actually a variation of the oldest con in the book. In the ultimate diagnosis of preclinical disease, the day you are born you are sinful and you must spend the rest of your life in the shadow of your incipient affliction. Although there is no cure for your sinful nature, strong doses of the palliatives dispensed by high priests, along with ample tithing, can mitigate your misery and self-loathing.
At the root of the problem with our health care system is a treatment centered diagnostic terrorism that does more to create diseases and profits than enable human health and well-being.
See “Use a brain scanner, go to jail!”
See also: “That Uneasy Feeling“
As a neurologist once explained to me, if you lose your keys that’s pretty common and normal.
If you forget what keys are for, you may have a deeper problem….
I have a jar full of keys for which I can divine no purpose. Does my collection of keys to forgotten doors mean I have a deeper problem? Should I buy a bottle of those memory enhancement pills being advertised on TV?
The nature of memory is widely misunderstood but even given that misunderstanding, we should be grateful that we possess the capacity for what most people call “forgetting” and I think of as “re-remembering”.