Recently in Healthcare Category

(A guest post by Dr. Peter Whitehouse, MD, PhD (Psychology) and MA (Bioethics), professor at Case Western Reserve University and a world renowned expert in the Alzheimer's field. Dr. Whitehouse is author of the Myth of Alzheimer's Disease and blogs about brain aging at Beyond the Myth.)

I have spent my life within the scientific, political, economic, and social institutions of the AD field-universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies-studying and treating human aging and disease. Now I am ready to challenge the power that the mainstream "Alzheimer's disease" myth has over us, helping people see what I have seen and to think critically about the evolution in thought that has occurred over the past several decades, which has shaped the way we see our aging bodies and minds and the way we act towards them. I want to spread a story of brain aging that can be a starting point for helping us better cope with and prepare for the travails of cognitive decline.

"The National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine recently estimated that approximately 18,000 people in the United States die every year because they do not have health insurance. This figure is startling by any account. In local terms, it means that America is losing an entire town the size of Chapel Hill every two and a half years. To put it another way, it is as if the human losses of Sept.11, 2001, were recurring six times a year.