The Medical Advisor

Debra Westbrook never imagined she’d be accused by the police of stealing her mother’s pets. But that’s exactly what happened one evening when the sheriff showed up after her mother, who lived next door, reported the “theft.” In that moment, Westbrook realized that dementia was rewriting her mother’s reality—one hallucination at a time. Her mom thought Westbrook had snuck in and out of her bedroom window and left with a cat under her arm. At first, it was deeply upsetting, Westbrook told The Epoch Times. “She looked at me so seriously and said, ‘Debra, I saw you,’” she said. In hindsight, Westbrook sees the humor in such an improbable accusation. “I learned then that caregiving for someone with dementia means accepting a new reality and learning to navigate it without judgment or argument,” she said. That night marked the beginning of a long, frustrating, but ultimately transformative experience for Westbrook and her husband, Billy, as they cared for her mother and her mother-in-law, b...

Medicine is strongly biased towards adopting biochemical models of disease as this facilitates costly therapeutics being developed for each disease and hence sustains the medical industry. Unfortunately, in many cases, the biochemical approach to disease, at best, can manage symptoms, and as a result, many conditions remain “incurable” while non-patentable natural therapies that can cure them languish in obscurity. That’s why, despite spending an ever increasing amount of money on Alzheimer’s research (e.g., the NIH spent 2.9 billion in 2020 and 3.9 billion in 2024) (1), we’ve still failed to make any real progress on the disease. This is particularly remarkable given the vast costs to the country (e.g., last year Alzheimer’s was estimated to cost the United States 360 billion dollars2) and the even greater social costs that accompany it. The Amyloid Juggernaut In 1906, plaques (of amyloid) in the brain were identified as the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. As the years have gone by, the...