The Alzheimer's Avoidance Association

Who are we?

We are a group of concerned citizens who are at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.  We have seen its effects on our parents, on our grandparents, on our aunts and uncles, and on our friends.  We have seen its devastating effect on Ronald Reagan, who fought a ten-year bout with Alzheimer’s and died at age 93.  We also see Art Linkletter, active, making TV appearances and full of life, activity and ideas at age 93.  Although we admire and respect both, we want to be like Art Linkletter in our 80’s and 90’s, not like Ronald Reagan was.

Notice: We who are at risk now formally proclaim:

We will not quietly into the darkness go.

We will not be robbed of happiness in our Golden Years.

We will not let our minds be stolen from us by Alzheimer's disease.

WE WILL NOT QUIETLY INTO THE DARKNESS GO!!

We pledge ourselves to fight back, to arm ourselves with knowledge, to do all in our power to shift the odds in our favor, increasing our chances of living full and happy lives and decreasing the probabilities of falling victim to the insidious malady known as Alzheimer’s disease.

We know that our medical doctors cannot help us.  They are waiting for the pharmaceutical companies to develop a cure.

We know that the pharmaceutical companies are working on the cure for Alzheimer's disease, but that their solutions will be limited to drugs or vaccines that they can patent and sell to us.  If the solutions turn out to be changes in diet, nutrition or lifestyle, they won’t tell us because they cannot sell these things to us.

We understand that we must help ourselves, like the parents of the boy named Lorenzo did in the movie, “Lorenzo’s Oil”.  We know that caring, really caring, and applying ourselves to the problem can make a difference. 

The owners of human bodies have different perspectives and priorities than those of their repair specialists (medical doctors) and the drug companies that develop products to sell to them.  History is replete with examples of treatments and cures that ordinary people found or developed that were in use for years before the medical community “discovered” them.  The scientific process is thorough, laborious and slow.  The emphasis is on being SURE and not making mistakes.  In time, they will get there, but how many of us will die or deteriorate beyond repair while we wait?

We want to know what we can do NOW! 

The deck is already stacked against us.  We want to rearrange the cards, to stack it in our favor. And we know that we cannot do this from nursing homes.  We must do it ourselves, while we still can, starting NOW!

Once an Alzheimer’s cure is developed it will, no doubt, take years of testing before it becomes available to the public.  We want to be ready and in the first wave to benefit from every scientific advance, in the first waves of testing and release.

We will make this a Crusade, and fight as though our very lives depended on our winning it.  Because, as a matter of fact, our lives and our futures DO depend on our winning this battle!

Remember:

It was not the learned University Professors who solved the problem of heavier than air flight.  It was a couple of bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright.

It was not the scientists of renown, with PhD’s in physics and mathematics who figured out and explained how the universe and atoms work.  It was an obscure clerk in the Swiss Patent Office named Albert Einstein.

The Titanic was built by professionals.  The Ark was built by amateurs!

It wasn’t the laboratory researchers who found out how to stop smallpox.  It was milkmaids who observed that none of them caught smallpox because they had all had cowpox.

The cure/prevention for rabies was a serum made by centrifuging the blood of a horse which had recovered from rabies.  It was a completely untested experiment by Louis Pasteur.  The parents of a French boy who had been bitten while protecting a child, begged Pasteur to try it, since rabies was always fatal and the boy was going to die if something wasn’t done.  Pasteur tried it, it worked, the boy was saved and we have rabies vaccine today.

If he had done that in our times he would have lost his medical license and probably been jailed for injecting someone with a substance not approved by the FDA!

The answers do not always come from learned men, acting prudently and according to all the rules and regulations.  Frequently the answers come from highly motivated “mavericks” who are willing to “think outside the box”.  Mavericks who succeed at doing the impossible because they really wanted to do it, and because they refused to accept the "common knowledge" that it could not be done!