Dale Bredesen - The End of Alzheimers Program: The First Protocol to Enhance Cognition and Reverse Decline at Any Age

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men assigned to guard the past.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

N EVER BEFORE HAS THE practice of medicine been as polarized by the dichotomy between reductionism and holism as exists today with relation to the treatment of Alzheimers disease.

Reductionism, as it is applied to the practice of medicine, takes the position that in order to best understand a disease process and ultimately formulate and implement an appropriate therapeutic intervention, both the disease and the intervention need to be reduced to the simplest operative parts and mechanisms. Many have credited the sixteenth-century French philosopher Ren Descartes with codifying this paradigm. Descartes, in part V of his Discourse, described the world as being nothing more than a clockwork machine that could be understood in its entirety through an exploration of its individual components. And clearly the progress of the science of medicine historically and in the present is deeply punctuated by landmark advances characterized by dedication to this approach.

Whether we are speaking of Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, using a single-lensed microscope to discover animalcules (microbes), or the sequencing of the human genome, the underpinnings of Western medicine continue to honor the notion that looking deeper and deeper at constituent parts will ultimately provide a knowledge base that will reveal sought-after solutions to challenging disease processes.

To be sure, microscopy led to an understanding of pathophysiology that directly resulted in wondrous advances leveraged for salubrious outcomes. But myopically engaging a philosophy centered on drilling down to unity in terms of parts and processes inevitably segues to sanctioning a therapy equally centered on the validation of the singular. Simply stated, embracing reductionism in medicine supports the ideology of monotherapy, the idea that the goal of modern medical research should be the development of single, magic bullets that are designed and marketed to counter single diseases.

As Harvard physician Dr. Andrew Ahn put it in a paper exploring the limits of reductionism in medicine:

Reductionism pervades the medical sciences and affects the way we diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases. While it has been responsible for tremendous successes in modern medicine, there are limits to reductionism, and an alternative explanation must be sought to complement it.

As of this writing, no disease process highlights the limitations of a reductionist approach as it relates to therapy more than senile dementia of the Alzheimers type. To be sure, the deep dive to unravel the etiology of this now-epidemic disease has been under way for decades and underwritten by hundreds of millions of dollars. Applying a reductionist approach has indeed revealed fascinating mechanisms that are likely involved in what ultimately manifests as this disease that now affects 5.5 million Americans. But alas, no single or combination pharmaceutical therapy has any effect whatsoever on modifying the inexorable course of Alzheimers disease.

As a testament to the tenacity of the pharmaceutical industry, several drugs are marketed to Americans and indeed globally with the idea that they somehow treat Alzheimers disease. But while these medicines may minimally affect Alzheimers symptoms, again they provide no benefit whatsoever with respect to actually improving the ultimate outcome. As Dr. Michal Schnaider-Beeri recently revealed in an editorial in the journal Neurology: Despite great scientific efforts to find treatments for Alzheimer disease (AD), only 5 medications are marketed, with limited beneficial effects on symptoms, on a limited proportion of patients, without modification of the disease course.

More recently, the concern for the lack of efficacy of these medications was overshadowed by a report appearing in The Journal of the American Medical Association revealing that not only do the commonly prescribed Alzheimers drugs lack efficacy, but their utilization is actually associated with more rapid cognitive decline.

In contradistinction to reductionism, holism places more value on exploring the forest as opposed to focusing on the single tree. To be sure, a holistic approach to health and disease absolutely embraces the discoveries of deep scientific pursuits, but the fundamental difference in comparison to reductionism is found when examining how science is utilized as it relates to actually treating a malady. Whereas reductionism looks for the one home-run solution, holism considers any and all options available if theres something positive to offer.

As you will soon discover in the pages that follow, for the first time ever a therapeutic intervention has been developed that successfully treats Alzheimers disease. The protocol developed by Dr. Bredesen is by definition holistic. His program incorporates the discoveries of research across a multitude of disciplines that have bearing on Alzheimers pathogenesis. Our most highly respected scientific research has clearly delineated the specific mechanisms whereby a vast array of seemingly unrelated processes contributes to the ultimate manifestation of this disease. And it is precisely because Alzheimers disease manifests from the confluence of multiple factors that its remediation requires the orchestration of diverse instruments.