Abstract
It can be difficult to face dementia. Despite the lives, the billions, the decades spent, it sometimes seems so little is known. The cupboard of treatments and answers can seem so bare. So let me, as a practitioner and family member, be the first of hopefully many to offer thanks to Drs. Boltz and Galvin, and all their collaborators. Thanks for meticulously constructing a manual of all the best available evidence on the care of the patient AND the family suffering with dementia. For there are some answers to sustain us as we move forward.
Strategies to prevent and detect the illness, the best pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic strategies currently known, recommendations to change clinics, communities and caregivers approaches to the illness, all are carefully explored and meticulously footnoted. This text also gives ample attention to an aspect of the illness so often overlooked – its mutability. The reader will find thoughtful discussions of how a patient and family might transition through various levels of care and how we clinicians might offer our knowledge and voices to make such transitions easier, both on an individual and public policy level. We are urged to reconsider definitions and old conceptions to embrace new opportunities – homes and communities that are designed to support the member with dementia, rather than feel intruded upon by a “dementia patient.” Space is also given over in nearly every chapter to remind us of the value of basic tenets of healthcare that become especially valuable in this context. Get to know the patient and the family. Provide friendly and knowledgeable faces and their diligent services.
Doctors, family members, nurses, patients, psychologists, social workers – all came together to create this volume. I can only hope, and recommend, that this book be read and used by a wide audience.