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Include Your Brain in Your Annual Physical
Don't be alarmed. This is not an unsolicited ad for Viagra from a pharmacy located in a row boat floating off the coast of Kochi (formerly known as Cochin) a port on the west coast of India. (Doesn't the use of Mr. Google's tool add more interest and humor to emails, while at the same expand your knowledge?).
A part of everyone over 50 years of age yearly or bi-annual check-up should include a long neglected organ, their brain!. Call it Remember me, Don't forget, Healthy Brain, Taking care of your favorite organ, or whatever the universal program ends up being call should establish for each of us a base line of results against which we could measure the health of our brain concerning issues of the diseases of dementia every year or so.
Every year we ask a physician to check out our heart, our liver, our prostrate, our breasts, and our eyes; but we almost universally neglect to check our brain. The most recent addition to the Dementia Action Agenda, the call to design a model and promote and reinforce this PCP activity is a part of my comprehensive plan to change how Physicians and citizens understand and relate to the issues created by the diseases of dementia.
We haven't been able to scare folks with the certainty of the impending increase in the number of people with diseases of dementia from 5 million to 15+ million in the next thirty or so years, perhaps we can convince them of the self interest issues of taking care and monitoring their own brains!
Individuals who are currently living with a diagnosis of one of these diseases are the best informed, most motivated, most effective, and most IGNORED segment of the population to speak to these issues. It's time to work with US to enable us, not disable us, to speak to our needs and to your needs, to better understand, adapt to, and abolish the major stigma associated with growing old - forgetfulness - and respond to it for what it is - a group of diseases which can in some cases, and temporarily be treated, but not yet cured.
For Instance, those of us with Alzheimer's disease do not become stupid, or dumb, or hard of hearing, or regress to childhood because of the disease. Yet, others treat us as if that were the case. We can never be who we were and who many people want us still to be, we are who we are. We need others to become more informed, more understanding, and make more of an effort to understand us.
Dementia includes a group of diseases and conditions which we do not yet fully understand. Therefor, unfortunately, we do not fully understand how and why they impact the people who are victims of these diseases. We banish them from our families because they don't fit in - take up too much of our time - disrupt the family, we store them in small warehouses until they die, we treat them as children because that is the only other way we know how to treat people other than as adults (we have pretty much given up in trying to understand how to treat teenagers, but we know they will grow out of it, whatever "it" is).
The best we can do RIGHT NOW, is monitor ourselves for these diseases hoping to identify and treat those who will be victimized by them; make more of an effort to understand those who do have the diseases and listening to what they have to say, and better support on-going research to find the causes and cures of the insidious diseases of dementia.
Annual brain check ups, is a good first step for everyone! Please pass this idea on to three of your friends and ask them to pass it on to three more. Thanks.
Richard Taylor
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