Earlier and earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease has become possible as neurologists learn more about the disease and scanning equipment and techniques improve. But the ability to know that a patient will develop the dreaded ailment years before symptoms become obvious presents a physician with a dilemma. Should a person be told Alz-heimer’s looms ahead of them when there is no cure, no way to stop the progress?
Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous old English sage, said “nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of being hung in the morning.”
Perhaps knowing one faced Alzheimer’s would similarly lead to a great concentration of effort in many directions. Maybe a doomed spouse would become more devoted. Perhaps a parent would spend much more quality time with children. Books laid aside would be picked up and finished. Trees planted. Friends visited more often with real attention paid.
Those who have a bucket full of things to do before they die, would go at the chore with a greater will if a departure date were given them. Or perhaps not.
The physician could not know how his patient would take the tragic news. Which one would respond by cramming as much more living into each day as energy allowed; which would fall into immediate despair and make the rest of life miserable for himself and those around him.
At this point in the story, a psychologist should come on the scene and take the measure of the patient. Those who could handle the truth should be told so that they could make decisions and embark on missions they might not feel the urgency to tackle if they assumed they had a store of fruitful years ahead.
Most of us, I suspect, are of two minds on the subject. When death lies immediately ahead, as is the case with some illnesses, then the ill should be told so planning can go forward. But how many of us really would want to know years ahead that we face increasing dementia, personality change, and then a period of black oblivion in which we most probably will hurt our family grievously before we succumb?
Put this down as another question that has only difficult, painful, uncertain answers.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
