What is Alzheimer’s Disease?
My close acquaintance with Alzheimer’s began when my husband Richard’s mother broke her ankle and the phone calls from her and from nursing staff in Florida added up to more than a fracture. We set out for Florida on Christmas Day in 2001 to see what the problem was. It took a few weeks to soldier through all the interviews, testing, some nasty medical malpractice and insurance fraud, and a beloved parent’s dreadful confusion and sorrow, to reach the conclusion that this feisty, educated, professional newspaper writer had moderately advanced Alzheimer’s. The diagnosis was made more difficult, her neurologist explained, because of her education and highly developed language skills.
Now, I am in a position to know that the anesthetic from the surgery on her ankle no doubt further damaged her failing ears. Furthermore, her great love of music and nightly listening to classical music on her favorite radio station had been interrupted by her hospitalization. But I was not so wise in those days. The upshot of family conferences, doctors’ diagnoses, and lawyers’ opinions was that Jean should come to Canada to live with us. During those last two years of her life, I not only saw Alzheimer’s up close 24/7, our son Daniel still was in the throes of schizophrenia that I had not yet figured out how to cure. His diagnosis in 1997 came with a prognosis of “once a schizophrenic, always a schizophrenic.” By 2001, his doctor and I had titrated his medication to a very low dosage. I found the similarities between his symptoms and Jean’s symptoms remarkable, although not identical. Today, I would blame Daniel’s medication for having kept him schizophrenic at that stage of his life, but in those days we abided by the medical mantra “take your meds,” although we had a different idea from most people how low those meds could be: 1/96 of the dosage of Risperdal he had received in hospital, where he had been taking other prescribed drugs as well. Jean died of a stroke in 2004.
In 2006, Daniel was healed of all his schizophrenia symptoms by the innovative treatment I call Focused Listening that you are learning about at this website.
“L.,” with a degree in sociology and a long career as a teacher and substitute teacher, has always been bipolar II (in my estimation). In 2012, she came to live with us following a minor oil spill at her house nearby, which the insurance company approached as a colossal disaster. Over the following months I noticed all the symptoms of developing Alzheimer’s: memory losses, deterioration in language, confusion about her location in familiar geography, extreme fatigue, irritability, narrowing interests, losses of self-control in eating, spending, and chattering with people, and fits of anger. All of these symptoms could be seen as the worsening of her bipolar symptoms for the simple reason that both bipolarity and Alzheimer’s are conditions of deteriorating ear function that slows the speeds of cerebral integration—in my opinion. When L. suddenly decided to move to Toronto, I was frantic. She was in no condition to live alone and unsupervised, even if the rooming house she was moving into was owned by a woman she already knew slightly. She could not be swayed. In the spring of 2013, I left my 70-year-old friend in a carpeted basement room with a bed frame without a mattress and piles of cartons that contained mostly trinkets, moldy old newspapers she had collected for years, old books, and other junk. She had a radio and access to a TV. She had no phone of her own. She planned to sleep on the floor. She, who had never learned how to cook, would be responsible for shopping and feeding herself. I had shared my concern with a mutual friend who would be checking in on her and keeping me posted. I was heartbroken.
When L. called me to bring her back for a visit a couple of months later, I returned to Toronto. While she was finishing tidying in the kitchen, I rested on her bed, which had a mattress thanks to the help of our mutual friend. I was fascinated by the sounds coming from somewhere in the large house, the boarders in which hailed from countries all over the world. The musical sounds included a flute or recorder of some kind, a tambourine or small drum, and what could have been a ukulele or some other unfamiliar folk instrument. The rhythms were steady but the sounds foreign and unpredictable. I was fascinated. I decided to learn more about this diligent group. I found L. in the kitchen and asked her where the music was coming from. She gave me an odd look and gestured to a door off the main hallway. I tapped and opened the door and to my astonishment was looking at the laundry where a dryer with broken bearings was whistling and banging and strumming with its load of metal-studded jeans and a pair of running shoes. The laundry room was directly over her bedroom. I shared my surprise with L., who was not amused. “That racket is going on day and night. I don’t know why [the landlady] doesn’t replace the dryer. I have to keep my radio on all night next to my ear to be able to sleep at all.” Before we left, I noticed that the little radio was positioned close to where her right ear would be situated with her head on the pillow.
As we drove back to rural southern Ontario I was amazed to find L. radically improved. Over the week of her visit I could see that not only had the Alzheimer’s symptoms disappeared, but her customary bipolar II symptoms were improved as well. She thoroughly enjoyed the next two years she spent in Toronto, making friends with the other boarders and becoming closer to the landlady. Unfortunately, the broken dryer quit its high-frequency contributions to the sound environment and was replaced by a quiet dryer. L. kept listening to the classical station and, since she has returned to her own house, keeps it on all day long. Of course, she has no memory of having had Alzheimer’s because it is the nature of Alzheimer’s—like schizophrenia—to prevent the embedding (reinforcement through recall) of experience we call “memory.” My paradigm of right-ear-driven left-brain dominance explains why, when that neurology fails through stapedius dystonia, learning and memory and other body systems also fail. Only those few other people who saw her then can attest to that interval of illness and its healing.
The theory about Alzheimer’s being caused by plaque is not responsive to laboratory testing (CBC News video, May 23, 2018, “Scientists concerned Alzheimer’s research will fail”).
However, my observations are validated by more conventional ambient music therapy that is being used to reverse Alzheimer’s and other dementia symptoms in nursing homes in places in the US, although they don’t understand why it works. Music & Memory®, a program for bringing music to people in nursing homes and other care facilities, runs an expanding program that has provided thousands of iPods to seniors in the US and Canada, the UK and Europe. Imagine what could happen if they applied Focused Listening to their Alzheimer’s patients!
The Tallman Paradigm explains how high-frequency music focused on the right ear strengthens the tiny stapedius muscle so it can transfer a higher volume of more accurate sound frequencies to the left-brain, which must dominate the right-brain for the person to remain rational and healthy in other ways controlled by the stapedius muscle.