Author Archives: wendy
Tablets and apps might be doctor’s orders of the future
Devices can enable doctors to closely monitor a patient
Is the doctor’s waiting room due for an update?If you have ever sat in a doctor’s waiting room, next to someone with a hacking cough and with only a pile of out-of-date Reader’s Digests for company, then you may have asked whether the system was fit for 21st Century living.
The NHS seems under increasing pressure, from GP surgeries to accident and emergency rooms. It feels as if the healthcare system is in desperate need of CPR – the question is will technology be the thing that brings it back to life?
Stop trying to cure Alzheimer's – and prevent it instead
One of Britain’s top dementia experts says we’ve wasted BILLIONS on useless drugs
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Danger zone: The brown areas of this brain show Alzheimer’s
We’ve been waiting for a breakthrough drug treatment for Alzheimer’s for decades.
An astonishing £25 billion has been spent worldwide on trying to develop one, and yet we still don’t have anything that can slow down, let alone stop, the disease.
It’s true that drugs such as Aricept may help some patients with their symptoms, but only for a short while.
That leaves patients and their families in the hopeless position of waiting for the drug companies to discover a treatment.
What’s so cruel is that no one has ever made it clear to them that it doesn’t have to be like that.
There are other options.
There are things that can be done to improve the situation right now — but governments, charities and other research bodies need to make a long overdue switch to a new strategy: preventing the disease.
What is amazing is that nearly all that £25 billion has been spent researching and testing ways to stop just one thing that goes wrong in patients’ brains.
Caring for carers
Guest blog by Beth
For many years I’ve thought of carers as the forgotten millions. As a family we certainly felt forgotten on many occasions during my dad’s 19 years with dementia, both before and during his years in care homes and his spells in hospital, and given what I hear at conferences, events, through my writing, social media and email, little has changed.
There is just one subtle difference though – I feel the voice of carers is becoming louder, more persistent and more difficult to ignore. Slowly but surely there is a movement growing in momentum, spirit and immovability that will, I hope, one day ensure that the needs, rights, knowledge and skill of unpaid carers is recognised and enshrined in the fabric of society.
