welcome to the organic green doctor blog

i am a family physician who was diagnosed with
early mild cognitive impairment(mci) amnestic type on december 21, 2010
this is a precursor to alzheimers disease
because of this diagnosis i have opted to stop practicing medicine
this blog will be about my journey with this disease
please feel free to follow me along this path
i will continue blogging on organic gardening, green living,
solar power, rainwater collection, and healthy living
i will blog on these plus other things noted to be interesting

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

my story revisited 1

MY STORY REVISTED 1
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i was contacted recently by a journalist and writer who reads my blog and has interviewed me before
she wrote i was thinking this morning that you should take your blogs on alzheimers and make them into a book

now ive thought about that several times
you can take your blogs as written and make a book from them
they take the blogs word for word and place them on the book pages

i thought about it since she wrote me
so
what i plan to do is to take blogs and make short chapters
i will date the blog with the original date it was written and will plan to do some editing since how i write has changed some over the last 8+ years

yes
i plan to not use caps or punctuation

as i read and edited this blog on mci it was surreal
this was september before i went up in november to volunteer for the alzheimers study to be in the normal control group
man was i going to be blindsided
reading this i realize how much more i know about memory loss now

since my mothers journey with alzheimers disease and my younger brother advancing in his disease i had started to spend time reading more about it and what one might do to slow it down
in my office i started putting literature in the exam rooms for folks to pick up and read

i actually about this time began to realize how little i knew about the disease

as ive read some of my blogs during this time well yes it bothers me
its like i was so innocent about what was going to happen

9-9-2010

MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT 
researchers studied 2000 older patients that were dementia free
16 % showed symptoms of mild cognitive impairment (mci)


mci is picked up on neuropsychological tests or memory tests like the moca test
the changes may be subtle
mci is thought to be the precursor or the early beginning of alzheimers

alzheimers changes in the brain occur 1-2 decades before symptoms show up in a person
research is looking to pick up mci earlier than it is now
with mci memory problems are greater than whats expected for when a person ages
eg  
its not where did i put my dang keys but what are these things im holding in my hand

mci occurs more commonly in men than women
yes we get screwed again since we also have more heart attacks and strokes than women
mci is twice more likely to be amnestic memory loss
i sure hope that doesnt include peoples names
mci is more prevalent in those with the apoe 4 gene which is a known risk factor for developing late onset alzheimers
mci is decreased in those with the most years of education
maybe all that medical school  will help me and maybe i will work on my phd
mci is increased in those who have never married and is lower in married persons
some of my relatives shouldnt get mci then

this is a summary from eupdate from the alzheimers disease and education referral center
tuesday september 7 2010


after i wrote this blog i realized i now knew a little more about what mci was
man
little did i know that label would be slapped on me in a few months and it would alter my life and my familys lives and many of my patients lives

next week 
chapter 2 where i wrote about more alzheimers stuff totally unaware of what was going on up in my own brain

this may be harder to do than i expected

the organicgreen doctor

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