Imagine what it’d be like if one of your loved ones suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Would you help them get part of their personality and memory back?
Well, that’ exactly what happened to Dr. Mary T. Newport, a pediatrician, when her husband developed the disease in his early fifties (1).
Dr. Newport’s husband, Steve, had been already suffering from dementia for five years before an MRI finally diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s. By this point, Steve was a pretty dire state.
“Many days, often for several days in a row, he was in a fog; couldn’t find a spoon or remember how to get water out of the refrigerator… One day I would ask if a certain call came that I was expecting and he would say ‘No.’ Two days later he would remember the message from so-and-so from a couple of days earlier and what they said.”, said Dr. Newport (2).
Steve’s frontal and parietal lobes, as well as his amygdala and hippocampus, were damaged and atrophied. Despite the fact that his short-term memory was virtually non-existent, Steve was still capable of calling new information days after the fact.
His wife had a feeling that his condition may have had a lot more to do with what he was eating than what his doctors lead on.
Steve took the medication his doctor recommended with little to no effect. He became depressed and lost weight. He eventually lost the ability to run and developed a strange gait and tremors.
See also: preventing Alzheimer’s
Soon enough, his wife took matters into her own hands, extensively researching clinical trials and alternative healing options in the hope of helping her husband regain some of his faculties.