Selling well-being in a pill

The title here is not original. I wish it were! The phrase comes from Al Power, M.D., author of DEMENTIA BEYOND DRUGS. This morning the St. Louis Post-Dispatch carried an article about research being done at St. Louis University (SLU) to study the effects of Ritalin on persons living with Alzheimer’s. I read the article amidst several mental alarms going off.

Source of one alarm: persons living with Alzheimer’s,  according to their family members, often display apathy, social withdrawal, loss of enthusiasm and indifference. Alarm: what might be some underlying causes of an apparent emotional change? Other medications? Bcoming depersonalized via an institutional task-oriented nursing home environment? Boredom? Lonliness?The sense of losing one's self in the institution?

Never fear, help is on the way! No need to reflect or investigate external stressors. A pharmaceutical company paid this SLU MD/professor $ 183,540 to see if their product might be just the right intervention, “well-being in a pill.” Oh, another thing, this same company, according to the article paid the professor $28,000 in 2010 to speak to other physicians about its products. Hmmmm.

In his book, Powers points out that all of the research done on the use of antipsychotics for persons living with dementia were funded by --- guess who --- yep, pharmaceutical companies.

Second alarm. This logic is presented by the SLU physician-researcher in this morning’s article: if a person is depressed, s/he is less focused on the environment and therefore at greater risk for falls. So if individuals have “greater energy” they will be more focused on their environment and less likely to fall. Pass the pills!

I wrote to Dr. Power about this article and asked his opinion. He wrote back saying that there has been some benefit in the use of Ritalin for depression, “but it's not well-studied, and it begs the question of whether we just continue to try and sell well-being in a pill.”

Dr. Power has a blog which can be found at www.changinganging.org. In a recent post, Power states succinctly the misplaced role of drugs for persons living with dementia in typical nursing homes. He says this: “The bigger issue is the inability to realize that much distress comes from our institutionalized, dehumanized approach to care for people with dementia. The real problem lies not so much with one particular class of drugs, but rather the idea that ANY pill is the solution to unmet needs or environmental stressors." (Emphasis mine.)

If you have not read DEMENTIA BEYOND DRUGS, you're missing a whole new world of understanding of dementia and a world of hope beyond its too-often-prescribed drugs.