Alzheimer’s: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Ever thought how would the world be if you lost ability to remember. How would it be if you forgot the first part of your sentence before you could think of the second?
I would take you to a journey from here which will both inform and intrigue you. I’ll show you what’s good and what’s bad.
Alzheimer’s, my friends, is a brain disorder or malfunction, named after a German doctor Alois Alzheimer, who first identified its symptoms and description sometime in 1906.
Here are mentioned a few things about Alzheimer’s:
Alzheimer’s is fatal:
This disease destroys brain cells causing problems with memory , behavior and thinking patterns which in turn affect life in all the possible aspects be it social life , work or personal. It is progressive and leads to death over time. It is one of the 10 biggest causes of deaths all over world.
Alzheimer’s is a type of Dementia which accounts for more than 50 percent of Dementia cases.
There are available medications for the symptoms but there is no cure for the disease. There are multiple ongoing research efforts which are trying to find methods to change the course of disease to improve the lives of millions of people suffering from dementia.
The cognitive symptoms can be treated with the medicines available which prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine which acts as an important chemical messenger for learning and memory.
The behavioral symptoms may vary from patient to patient depending on the way they feel and act. At different stages of illness patients may experience hallucinations, delusions, restlessness and physical or verbal outbursts. There are drugs available to treat physical discomfort but the behavioral symptoms can be treated by changing the environment, or by being more understanding for their mean and ornery behavior.
As we progress in our lives we face occasional memory loss that is being forgetful. But if the severe memory losses and confusions become more frequent then we should get worried that our brain might be failing. Our brain cells communicate with many others to process information, some of them tell our muscles when to move, some help in hearing, thinking and smelling. In Alzheimer’s, as in other types of dementia, increasing number of brain cells die everyday, making our brain too weak to work.

Now for everything you would find pros and cons. We now know what’s bad about Alzheimer’s. I found some people talking about what good does the Alzheimer’s do and what may be termed as ugly about our reaction toward it. Let’s get them one by one.
Good First,
I was reading this article in NYTimes where a lady was talking about the mapping of Alzheimer’s symptoms with the stages of Yoga. She remembered her mother who was suffering from this disease. She talks about how she saw her mother’s brain slowly atrophying and her behavior changing from normal to satisfactory then to the worse. The good that she found out of this disease was that her mother was being more of herself now. She was living “in the moment” because there was no past to remember or no future to worry about.

Alzheimer’s is about living in the present. To exist outside of memory is to occupy the moment wholly. For instance, her mother quit smoking around the time of her diagnosis. As she explained it, when her mother would have the urge to smoke, she would forget to light up before she got her hands on the pack, and so broke a 50-year addiction. It seemed the craving no longer got stuck in her memory circuits, and so easily fell away.
In another instance, ( as in NYTimes ) Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who wrote a book detailing her experience of a stroke that temporarily wiped out the language and other functions of her left brain, describes the right-brain-left-brain dichotomy as dividing thinking about the present — in the right hemisphere — and thinking about the past and future — in the left. The left hemisphere, she says, is responsible for “that ongoing brain chatter.” The right brain, in her rendition of it, collects data through the senses “and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what the present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.”
Now Comes the Ugly part:
Isn’t it time to stop romanticizing tragic conditions like Alzheimer’s and mental illness? I read it somewhere and it made me question why do we have to find good out of a disease? It is quite possible for us to decide whether to enjoy the present and “live in the present” or to worry about the past ad future. A painful degeneration of brain is no way to teach us how live in the present, how to be what we are.
(As in NYTimes)
The cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness may sometimes signal a higher, healthy state, but it can also signal dysfunction and, taken to the extreme, death. We the living need to be bothered and angered and saddened by what we see around us. We need our memories and our projections into the future in order to make progress — scientific and otherwise. From time to time we need to stop and smell the roses, to live in the moment in order to refresh ourselves for the work ahead or to learn to accept those things we must accept, but we ought to thank our lucky stars we can choose to do so, and perhaps we ought to be careful about comparing that choice to the inescapable conditions of those who are ill.
I would leave it up to you decide.