-by Bill Watkins
Christian Scientist

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Everyone’s pretty excited about “Alzheimer’s Disease,” something named in 1906 by its namesake doctor, but not mainstream until the 1980’s. Dr. Alois Alzheimer noticed irregularities in people’s brains, as neurologists continue to diagnose today, the National Institutes of Health estimating last year there were around seven million Americans over sixty-five plagued with its brand of dementia and memory loss.

Did you know that Repressed Childhood Trauma also causes memory loss? Google it. One might argue in order of events that Repressed Childhood Trauma, stemming from… the childhood… supersedes any diagnosis to the brain of a person in their advanced years. Could one say there is a more plausible root of memory loss in our childhoods (environment) than in some sort of God-given/birth given genetic curse?

Science is fallible, no matter what scientists (fallible human beings) say. The Covid disaster from certain perspectives was as much a disaster of Western medical reaction and inconsistency of offered remedy as it was a mighty tough virus. There is theoretical medicine and factual. There is the beautiful photograph my orthopedic surgeon gives me to point out my fracture (factual) next to his or her decision to operate as a “cure” (theoretical).

There is a gigantic element of salesmanship in Western medicine, as well, that cannot be overlooked when examining any scientific or “health” dilemma. A lot of money on the line! Staying with the orthopedics example: It’s a few hundred bucks in this country to diagnose a bone issue to a patient (factual), while surgery (theoretical) yields thousands from insurance companies and personal accounts of the uninsured.

“Health” is a word, in and of itself, that lacks official definition in government and legislating life. There is literally no working definition of the word in Government! Not in ours, at least… I’ve reached out to Nancy Pelosi’s office, one of Obama Care’s architects, asking what their definition of Health was. No response. Same with Bernie Sanders’ office, and same from the Democratic National Committee in Washington D.C. Nothing. I did a little Twitter survey of fifteen or so users, found that there were fifteen out of fifteen different definitions of health.

So this is a push back on Alzheimer’s. A push back on the “expertise” of Western doctors who stand to gain materially by big diagnoses and big payoffs. I am not saying there isn’t actual care for patients mixed into Western medicine, just pushing back. I hope in this also is a seed yielding the flower that is research yielding fact. Repressed Childhood Trauma causes memory loss. What is more reasonable, that we are born with genetic curses or that we are born equipped well to live through sickness and malady, and that environmental stuff happens in life to throw us off of a healthy trajectory?

What is more reasonable, that God or birth injected into us certain “bad” genes damning us to late life suffering, or… factors in childhood and life threw us into funks, in some cases so severely that we cut off those periods from our memory as too painful to revisit. To rethink or relive those moments was too difficult, so we obliterate them from our minds. It is such brains/minds, in my opinion, that Dr. Alzheimer, so many years ago, studied under a microscope to find had abnormalities in them.

Were those abnormalities from “bad” genes or bad living? Can childhood abandonment, rape, abuse, incest or being locked in a closet do enough damage to the brain when coupled with repression of memories to cause abnormalities that a doctor might deem “Alzheimer’s Disease” and gain a lucrative patient for a few years? I think it’s reasonable to think, yes. If so, let’s rethink our excitement for a trendy diagnosis that justifies putting parents away in homes, leaving them to drug treatments and nurses; leaving them to waste away instead of helping them suffer through their childhoods to find, then utter the truth of their pain.

Unlocking negative memories perhaps a key to restoring all of them. Sounds reasonable. Sounds more reasonable than “God cursed my parent with the Alzheimer’s gene. You know the one not mentioned in any spiritual book that’s more powerful than God?” Not reasonable to me. Not plausible, and from laziness and money to spend on professional instead of familial parent care. Let’s wake up to our trauma and break free! Let’s welcome the mental breakdowns sure to happen when we look back, putting the microscopes not on tissue as much as, “Break out the tissues, it’s time to cure our wounded emotions!”

Looking at any non-native family history, is it… unreasonable… to think that we immigrant descendants in this country, so far away from our original roots, might have a lot of trauma, sadness and homesickness to work out? There’s a choice, to me: work it out with drugs, doctors and nurses, or go back to God, even G.O.D. – Good Orderly Direction, as they speak of in Twelve Step rooms. Go back to the wilderness of our beginnings, be it in Scandinavia, Africa, Asia or Latvia, go back to what our folks did to us and theirs to theirs – find the real cure to our wandering minds and bodies.