Maureen Shares How She Advocates For Her Alzheimer's Father (VIDEO)

Maureen:

I am very fortunate. Dad is taking one, and he is involved in a clinical study right now with Banner, and he got into that study because he wasn’t taking anything. I tend to be kind of take-charge, and he was losing weight terribly when he was on Aricept, and he wasn’t interested in eating, and he’d lose ten pounds, and we'd go to the doctor and the doctor would say, “You know Armand, you really need to eat.”

Well, an Alzheimer’s patient, that means nothing, nothing to them. They’re not hungry, they don’t think of it, they can’t smell, they can’t taste, and so I took him off everything he was taking, and his appetite came back and he was still Alzheimery, but he was clearer.

He wasn’t fuzzy, and I don’t recommend that for everyone, but I do think that we, as caregivers, do have a tremendous responsibility to be the advocates for our loved ones, and we do need to be more interactive when it comes to their medication, and because the doctor says, "Well, take these for six months," and you don’t see any difference, any improvements, or any change, and then you see deterioration, why take it anymore? It’s not working, whatever it is.

And then of course I think about the fact that well, you know, the doctors don’t know all that much either. So it’s not really you have to take Aricept; it’s the only thing they have right now.

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