Why We Are So Clueless About Alzhiemer's

My mother has Alzhiemer's.  As I and my sibling's struggle to find some way for her to live out her life as comfortably as possible and die as peacefully as possible, it has become apparent to me the medical profession is pretty clueless about why Alzhiemer's progresses differently in each person, and that the drug companies solutions, as to any particular person, are unguided missles, as likely to cause harm as good.

In the middle of this ongoing struggle I ran across an article in Science News (August 24, 2013, p. 15) that rekindled frustrations that I have felt for decades.   The article discussed a July 25 article in "Current Biology" reporting on recent research that found that people do not sleep as well on nights when the moon is a full, even if they are in a windowless room where they have no idea it is a full moon.   Other sleep researchers reported being surprised by the findings, although they have praised the study as well conceived and executed.   What struck me as particularly significant was the leader of the research team reported he was at first reluctant to publish the study because "If you publish lunar stuff, your going to be put in the "lunatic' corner and not be considered a serious sleep researcher anymore."

It is disheartening that the sleep research scientists found the studies results surprising.  There is so much data from other disciplines that has existed for decades - data about more crime during a full moon, more conceptions during a full moon, the stock market falling during a full moon.  How can any field of scientific enterprise still be surprised in 2013 that the full moon influences behavior?

The answer, sadly, can be found in the researchers comment about being afraid of being put in the "lunatic" corner.  In our western culture Astrology has been viewed as heresy - incompatible and competing with religion - for centuries because it challenged the ability of church leaders to use the Bible to claim they were the final source of knowledge on everything.  The bias is so ingrained that any idea that could be interpreted as suggesting that what is happening with the moon, sun or planets might have predictive value for human behavior was career suicide for a scientist.

The hard sciences, physics, astronomy, chemistry, have managed to largely put the bias behind them. Even large parts of biology are no longer encumbered by this bias.  But those areas of science that most directly affect human behavior, medicine and the social sciences, are still wearing blinders.   

Science has known for 100+ years that many of the chemicals in our body are not constant, the ratio's of different chemical's rise and fall predictibly over the course of a day, a lunar month or a year.  Over the years research findings have documented that the time of the day, or the time of year a person is born can predict things like when a women begins menopause, or who is a good driver or a bad driver.  

Yet little or no research funding goes to look at how those predictable fluctuations in our body chemistry affect us.  As a result we as a culture still have no real idea how to develop truly personalized medicine.  It is pretty apparent to all of us we are all different.  Yet medicine, psychiatry, and the drug industry, still treat us all as identical chemical clones.  

Think of the feel good commercials on which drug companies spend billions to fill our airwaves.  Each one is followed by some person talking as fast as they possibly can about all the possible bad things that can happen from taking the drug.  Yet neither the drug companies nor the medical profession generally have a clue why some drugs help some people and harm others.  More disheartening, they don't seem particularly interested in finding out.

Someday we will put aside the prejudice against investigating how those predictible changes in our body chemistry make us different from those whose chemical processes started at a different stage in the fluctuating chemical reaction.  Until then we have to learn to live with the fact science has been most impaired by ancient prejudices in those areas that have the most direct impact on our ability to understand in what ways we are all slightly different chemical beings. 


For related discussions:
http://motrvoter.blogspot.com/2012/05/big-surprise-genetics-is-of-little-use.html
http://motrvoter.blogspot.com/2011/09/nature-v-nurture.html
http://motrvoter.blogspot.com/2013/04/obamas-mapping-brain-project.html
http://motrvoter.blogspot.com/2013/04/what-western-medicine-is-good-at-and.html