Don’t let the lab coats and scrubs fool you. Those trappings might be functional, but they camouflage one of the greatest secret weapons a medical professional can possess — the heart of a warrior.
Health Care Quarterly asked the folks on the frontlines of health care to think about their work like its a battle — because it often is. What is their biggest foe, and — most important — what are the tools in their arsenal to help stay ahead?
In medicine, there is no bigger challenge than that of Alzheimer’s disease. Everyone over the age of 60 (and anyone who plans to live beyond that age) is at risk for this neurologic disease. Affecting more than 44 million people and the costing more than $500 billion, Alzheimer’s and dementia already represents an urgent public health emergency. If better treatments are not found soon, the numbers of people affected will triple and health care systems will be stretched to a breaking point.
Some days work is hard: we still don’t have effective therapies and this disease continues to enact a huge toll on those affected. And while the recent spate of negative clinical trial has been discouraging (there have been no new FDA approved medications since 2003), I firmly believe we are making significant progress in our war against this disease. We now know that the pathological changes that cause Alzheimer’s disease start years to decades before the symptoms emerge. Armed with new diagnostic techniques that can tell us when these changes are starting to occur, a new generation of sophisticated drugs are being now tested. As leader of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health’s clinical trial program, my team and I work day in and day out to further the progress of Alzheimer’s disease research.