By Joel Thurtell
I waited for heated letters responding to Gina Kolata’s landmark article about Alzheimer’s disease in the Sunday, August 29, 2010 New York Times.
“Years Later,” the Times headlined, “No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease.”
Kolata’s article drummed on one theme: NOTHING in the medical arsenal will prevent or slow the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
This did not come as news to me. When she was practicing medicine, my wife used to tell patients and family members the same thing: Name-brand medications like Arisept, Namenda and Exelon that are earning big bucks for their manufacturers do absolutely nothing to quell the onset of or modify the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
When response letters to Kolata’s article were printed, none took note of her and The Times’ dominant theme that NOTHING works against Alzheimer’s.
I was surprised. To me, the article was a landmark pointing to — I hope — better awareness of the futility of current treatment options and the absolute need for new and better research.
Now, the flip side to what I just wrote is very, very depressing: The Times has blown the whistle on decades of squandered money and opportunity.
How, I ask, is it possible that so much time and money were spent and we have no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s?
My late father-in-law had Alzheimer’s, and my wife, an M.D., was frustrated with his physicians, who routinely prescribed these no-good remedies as if there was no question about their utility.
In fact, the evidence cuts precisely the opposite way. Thanks to The Times, we know that these drugs are without effect as treatments for Alzheimer’s.
Repeat: As treatments for Alzheimer’s, they are worthless.
Well, worthless as seen from the perspective of patients. They are cash cows to their manufacturers, pharmacies and everyone up and down the drug industry food chain who profits from their sale.
In reality, they are worse than useless for patients. They can be harmful.
They have side-effects that can threaten patients’ sanity as well as put them in life-threatening situations.
More about side-effects in a future column.
That NOTHING can slow or stop the onset of Alzheimer’s, reported Kolata, was the conclusion last spring of a 15-member National Institutes of Health jury after studying reams of articles about this mind-destroying disease.
If you think learning Latin will stave off Alzheimer’s, forget it.
If you think running five miles a day will save your mind, forget it.
If you think taking any of an assortment of expensive drugs called cholinesterase inhibitors will slow the disease down, save your — or your insurance company’s — money.
There is no evidence that any of these things will help.
And there is moderate evidence that some of these measures, including cholinesterase inhibitors, are useless.
When you reflect on how automatically physicians continue to prescribe these useless drugs, the Times article has profound implications. It raises a troubling question: Why do physicians prescribe useless drugs for Alzheimer’s patients?
I spoke to a woman whose husband is on one of the cholinesterase inhibitors. She said she told the doctor that the medication is very expensive and wondered what good it would do. The physician told her it would do no good. Why, she asked, do you prescribe it? Because, he replied, the drug companies make us do it.
That sounded like hooey. How can drug companies force doctors to prescribe drugs they know are useless?
There is a way. It’s called advertising.
I talked to a doctor who prescribes these drugs, although she is convinced they do no good. Why prescribe them? I asked. Because of the drug companies’ advertising, the doctor told me. Patients see commercials on TV. They come in and demand to be put on this or that “magic bullet” drug.
I thought there would be angry reaction to the article, because many in the medical community are prone to prescribing various activities and drugs which, we now know, do nothing to prevent or slow the disease.
Actually, the article did make one person angry.
Me.
I was not angry about the message.
I was upset, because I know people who have taken drugs prescribed by physicians supposedly to slow the progress of Alzheimer’s.
And we know now, through the semi-official proclamation of The New York Times, that the drugs are useless.
I was also angry about a side finding of the jury, again reported by the Times, that the quality of research into Alzheimer’s has been consistently shoddy.
Huge amounts of money have been wasted on lousy research, while persons suffering from memory and cognitive losses wait and hope that our best medical brains will come up with a cure.
I’ll be writing more about Alzheimer’s and how we deal with it in future columns.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
