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Therapies administered to treat Alzheimer’s disease could be doing more harm than good, while modern medicine ignores known effective treatments. This is according to a recent post by “A Midwestern Doctor” on The Forgotten Side of Medicine Substack.

Alzheimer’s is a runaway epidemic in many developed countries, and is increasingly prevalent in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease that accounts for a majority of dementia cases worldwide, and is one of the top-ranked causes of death in the United States. It involves the buildup of amyloid (protein) plaques in the brain, which causes memory, reasoning, and behavior problems.

Treating the Symptom

Modern therapies focus on removing those plaques, but according to the Substack Reversing Alzheimer’s: The Forgotten Causes and Cures Big Pharma Buried, amyloids build up because of a “mechanism the brain uses to protect itself from stressors that endanger brain tissue.” So attempting to treat Alzheimer’s by eliminating them is “doomed to fail.” In other words, mainstream treatment doesn’t work because it’s treating a symptom, not the source. However, “the money behind this juggernaut has caused research into the real causes of Alzheimer’s to be suppressed.”

The blog cites three peer-reviewed studies revealing new information that deserves attention:

“Reversal of Cognitive Decline: 100 Patients,” published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease & Parkinsonism in 2018;

“Precision Medicine Approach to Alzheimer’s Disease: Successful Pilot Project,” published in 2022 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease; and

The 2024 case series “Sustained Cognitive Improvement in Alzheimer’s Disease Patients Following a Precision Medicine Protocol,” published in the journal Biomedicines.

Bredesen’s Studies & Treatments

A researcher who took part in each of these studies is Dale E. Bredesen, who teaches at UCLA’s medical school in Los Angeles, California. His eponymous protocol involves applying individually targeted therapies to different cases of Alzheimer’s based on their cause.

For Bredesen, plaques are merely a symptom. He identifies six triggers that, over time, play a key role in disease development. They are inflammation, insulin resistance (chronically elevated blood sugar), nutrient and hormonal deficiencies, toxins, blood flow restrictions, and severe or chronic head trauma.

Bredesen’s recommended treatments vary based on these causes, but A Midwestern Doctor mentions a few. “China recently developed a surgery to increase the lymphatic drainage from the brain,” he writes, citing studies that show such drainage necessary “to eliminate amyloid from the brain.” Doctors have also witnessed impressive results with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a compound that is commonly used topically for pain and inflammation relief.

Doctors in more than 125 countries prescribe it for a plethora of other conditions, but the U.S. Food & Drug Administration limits its use. DMSO.org attributes that reticence to the death of a woman in Ireland in 1965. She had taken DMSO with several other drugs and suffered a severe allergic reaction. Though the causative agent was never determined, popular opinion attributed the death to DMSO, and the FDA shut down clinical trials. Since then, no other deaths attributable to DMSO have occurred.

A Midwestern Doctor hopes that the MAHA movement will end the sidelining of such treatments in the United States.

This article is part of The New American’s weekly online newsletter Insider Report, which is emailed to TNA subscribers each week. Click here to subscribe to The New American to receive the Insider Report and access exclusive content.