interview with a health service manager

James Healy: You've had significant experience dealing with Alzheimers patients.

Health Service Manager: About forty years.

JH: Is there any hope we'll ever cure this?

HSM: It's incurable and I think it will always be incurable.

JH: Do you not think we might find a way...

HSM: Based on what I've seen I don't think we'll find a cure.

JH: You see no hope.

HSM: I don't want to say that.

JH: You see no hope of what I think will happen... that we will find a cure?

HSM: I see no hope of a cure. I don't think it's possible.

JH: In all your time running or managing this facility, have you noticed anything about the condition, anything that maybe others are missing?

HSM: What do you mean?

JH: Well I just think we should be talking to people like you. I think people like you who have worked with Alzheimers patients directly over a long period of time in a hands on way, will sometimes have seen something that perhaps more highly credentialled doctors and scientists are missing. I'm asking you have you noticed anything about your patients that may not be showing up in the clinical analyses.

HSM: Well the only thing I might say I've noticed... It's something I think I've seen... Well in a lot of cases it seems to me that the person has experienced a really sad event, something really... I mean really.... disruptive. And that they've never come to terms with it. I think I've noticed this in a lot of people. I'm not absolutely sure. But I think I have seen something like this in many cases.

JH: Anything else?

HSM: Well. I don't really want to say this either.

JH: Anything else that might be a common factor that the rest of us are overlooking. Anything at all.

HSM: I would hesitate to say it. But I think people who don't go on the medications tend to do a little bit better than those who do.

JH: Okay.

HSM: What makes you think it will be healed?

JH: Every question has an answer. I do think a healing will be possible. I've seen people recover their capacity to speak and respond while interacting with dogs. It seems to me that if the capacity is recoverable briefly, it may be recoverable more permanently. But I've suspected for years that we're looking for healings in the wrong place.

HSM: What do you mean by the wrong place?

JH: We've been looking for healings that specifically provide a profitable business model for pharmaceutical companies to prescribe drugs. We're rifling through the genetics and ignoring any linr of investigation that doesn't require a billion dollars to finance it. The healing, the solutions, the cures, in some instances may lie elsewhere and may come through different methodologies. For instance, in our capacity to love one another. In the effort we make to set up genuinely loving care facilities rather than inhuman institutions staffed by trade unionised psychopaths. Forgive me. The healing may come through the science of according dignity to the sufferer and learning to love him or her in spite of everything. Who knows what we'll notice if we take the time to genuinely care! That may be the duty we have. I gotta tell you. Maybe some of the rest of us supposedly well people become slightly less monstrous when we make the effort to love Alzheimers patients unconditionally. Maybe the light that can come from this is that selfish atheistic people will learn to love by helping others. The love will be where the cures are found. Even you Sister, taking time to notice a causality for Alzheimers that is not mentioned in the pharmaceutical and medical literature. That's a result of love. The according of dignity to the person may be a key to many locked doors. Doors that either well intended or cynically malicious scientists are trying to bludgeon open with narcotics. I'm suggesting we should be exploring the potentialities of love. For all of our sicknesses. It's a suspicion I've had for some time.