Don’t Look Up Please Look Up

Well, it was quite a memorable Academy Awards ceremony, for a number of reasons, and one of the films nominated for Best Picture was Don’t Look Up, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep. As a massive comet bears down on Earth, growing larger in the sky each night, citizens are told not to look up — to ignore the obvious peril, while commercial interests profit from an ineffective plan to address the problem. Sound familiar?

We have all been told that “there is nothing that can prevent, delay, or reverse Alzheimer’s disease,” that there is no reason to check our genetic risk because nothing can be done, and that there is no reason to do extensive blood tests because the cause of Alzheimer’s is simply unknown. Instead, we are told to trust the pharmaceutical companies to come up with an effective solution, and of course to pay much more for our Medicare because the Alzheimer’s drugs are not only ineffective, they are also exquisitely expensive. 

So Instead of not looking up at the impending problem, we should all be looking up:

● Anyone who is 45 or older should be evaluated with a cognoscopy, and begin active prevention.

● Anyone with even a modest decline in cognition — whether memory loss or difficulty with planning, calculating, recognizing, navigating, or word finding — should be evaluated, since the earlier the treatment, the more likely an optimal outcome.

● No one should accept the claim that “your cognitive problems are just part of normal aging.” Cognitive decline occurs for a reason, and usually several reasons all contribute to the cognitive loss. 

● Working with a knowledgeable team — an expert practitioner, a well-trained health coach, a modern nutritionist, and others — is the best way to achieve success. The team can help you to start with the 7 basics — nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, brain training, targeted supplements, and detox — and then focus on identified contributors to cognitive decline.

● Virtually every contributor to cognitive decline can be addressed — from insulin resistance to chronic infections to toxin exposure to sleep apnea to vascular disease to leaky gut to periodontitis, and on and on — identifying and addressing these contributors with a personalized protocol such as ReCODE has achieved the best results of all treatments to date.

● You don’t have to be perfect! Simply working with your practitioner and health coach to continue to optimize is often successful. Please don’t give up — there is so much that can be done, and if decline continues, please work with your practitioner to determine why this is.

To be told by the “experts” that there is nothing that can be done about Alzheimer’s or pre-Alzheimer’s, to be told to ignore peer-reviewed, published data showing repeated success, to be told that a drug that does not improve cognition or even halt decline is a “breakthrough,” and to be told that cognitive loss is “just part of normal aging” despite proof to the contrary — well, it kind of feels like a slap in the face, doesn’t it?