Fifteen. The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale E. Bredesen, MD
2017, Avery, 320 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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Dale E. Bredesen’s book was born of frustration. Frustration with other doctors who accept the status quo — that which determines that there is currently no cure or preventative measure for Alzheimer’s disease, and once it was diagnosed, all that can be done for the patient is give them the progression of what’s going to happen to them and permission to spend every waking moment thinking about their rotten luck, until they can’t; frustration with the research community, that does not spend enough time out of the comfort zone which is the presumed root cause of the disease; frustration with the drug companies, that spend too much time, effort and money on solutions that may increase the patient’s life, but also their suffering, and would not prevent or remedy the disease in question at all.
The problem driving all of these situations, is that the modern world of medicine believes that each disease has a single cure. Alzheimer’s can’t have a single cure, Bredesen claims in this book, because it doesn’t have a single root cause. It has thirty six.
Throughout the rest of the book, Bredesen explains in depth the real root cause of Alzheimer’s disease, a crucial process to the creation and maintenance of neurons, with a favorable and a non-favorable outcome, depending on various aspects of its environment, and how thirty six different factors can contribute to these aspects being present or absent.
He then goes on to provide a meticulous protocol of evaluation of whether any of the thirty six factors are a part of your life, and a prevention and remediation protocol of how to remove or improve them. Bredesen explains in the book that this can be done either as a therapeutic approach — the book is riddled with stories of patients of Bredesen’s who have experienced remissions of Alzheimer’s at various stages of the disease’s progression — or as a preventative measure, if you have a family history of Alzheimer’s or had your genome mapped and discovered that you carry one of the genes that contribute to a higher risk of having the disease.
