How can problems of knowing and remembering be helped in Alzheimer’s disease?
June 21, 2011
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Nicole Scheidl is founder of Fit Minds Cognitive Health Products. Laura Bramly is the author of the book, Life Scenes. They explain how they came to be involved in work with Alzheimer’s disease. They discuss therapies for helping with problems of knowing and remembering for persons with the disease. They explain the particular ways in which therapies can help family caregivers and their family members with the serious problems of knowing and remembering that occur with the disease. They highlight the role of family caregivers. They explain how the therapies help family caregivers as well as the persons with the disease they are caring for. Acknowledging that people are living longer and longer so more and more people are likely to develop the disease, and that healthcare planners are planning for more and more for caring at home, they say what more needs to be done to provide more of the benefits for family caregivers of the therapies they’ve described.
Family Caregivers Unite!
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Family caregivers are the people who provide care to partners, parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors and even co-workers. They are the people who provide care when everyone else has gone home. They are the people who organize the functioning of the home for the person with special needs, and for the family as a whole. They are the coordinators of care, the managers of appointments, the preventers of loneliness, and the makers of decisions even to the point of Power of Attorney. And they are so often people who themselves are burdened with their own health challenges and who may be in only marginally better health than the persons to whom they are providing family caregiving.
Dr. Gordon Atherley
Dr Gordon Atherley holds the British equivalent of the Canadian PhD and MD degrees, and LLD, Honoris Causa, from Canada’s Simon Fraser University. His awards include Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK. His medical specialties are occupational medicine and public health.
As first President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, the Canadian equivalent of the US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, he led the creation of Canada’s electronic information service in occupational health and safety, now used in more than 40 countries.
In academia, he held senior, tenured, full-time positions, including departmental chair, in university faculties of physics, engineering, and medicine. He is the author of a textbook and numerous articles and publications.
Since retiring from medical practice, he’s built up Greyhead Associates, which critically researches the safety, effectiveness and fairness of health services for persons with special needs.
Through Virtual Care International, a company of which he’s President, he’s involved in providing sensible technology to family caregivers to help them with their responsibilities, workloads, and concerns.
Now an activist, he urges family caregivers to unite because, more and more, it’s not just their families who depend on them, it’s also the healthcare system as a whole, as it struggles to meet more and more needs of more and more people.
