Rescue Your Failing Brain Before It's Too Late!: Optimize All Hormones. Increase Oxygen and Stimulation. Steady Blood Sugar. Decrease Inflammation. Improve Immunity. Heal Leaky Gut. Detoxify.

By J.M. Swartz M.D. and Y.L. Wright M.A.

In this book, “RESCUE YOUR FAILING BRAIN BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!” you will learn simple action steps to prevent and reverse brain degeneration. It is easy to ignore subtle signs of mental deterioration. But if you don’t take action now, sooner or later you may end up with serious cognitive issues like my mother, who was found by the neighbors wandering around naked in the middle of the night. Act now, before it is too late!

We have been taught to believe that nothing can be done once you get Alzheimer’s disease. If told that you have it, you are counseled to get your affairs in order now while you can still make decisions, because you will not be able to make decisions as the disease progresses. Unfortunately, this advice is still being given out. But, it does not have to be true. There is something that we can do.

Alzheimer’s disease is not only preventable, but is also reversible, especially in the early stages. Individualized programs can be developed to specifically address each person’s problem areas. We can identify and address the causes. Many of these causes revolve around diet and lifestyle. Common causes include antibiotic use, prediabetes, obesity, and a sedentary lifestyle.

If no action is taken now, your symptoms will probably progress over time. If you notice that you are losing your memory abilities, think about how long you have noticed this and think how much it has progressed over the last year or over the last two years. This is a clue to how fast the brain degeneration is happening. You may notice that the degeneration is speeding up as time goes on. Next year will be even faster.

Waiting until your memory declines even further is the worst thing that you can do. This is the mistake made by standard-of-care health care. If you notice symptoms, you must take matters into your own hands and not depend on your primary-care physician to act.

If you are determined to get your brain working better, it won’t be hard. With diligent application of the strategies that you will learn in this book, your brain will reverse gears, bursting out of the sickening downhill slide of memory, mood, cognition, energy, and digestion, and into the recovery of lost abilities.

Follow the advice given in this book to stop your brain from degenerating further and to begin to rehabilitate your lost brain health. Learn how to prevent and reverse the progression of dementia and other cognitive problems in yourself and in your loved ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312513280

Book preview

Introduction. RESCUE YOUR FAILING BRAIN!

Without brain health, we have no health! Instead of just managing the symptoms of your failing brain, learn what causes your brain function to deteriorate in the first place and how to immediately reverse course.

You have only a short window of opportunity to rescue your failing brain, before it is too late. What most people don’t realize is that there is a window of opportunity in which you must take immediate action if you want to reverse the problem of brain degeneration. If you miss this window, it is very difficult to make headway against the problem.

NOW is the time to make the necessary lifestyle changes to prevent further deterioration. Read this book and learn how to make the changes that are necessary to prevent and even reverse the brain degeneration that has already happened. We will discuss the latest technology in diet, exercise, and supplements. Even if you have a strong family history of Alzheimer’s, and you believe that you have the genes for it, you can modify the triggers to keep the disease from ever expressing itself.

It may be shocking for you when you begin to take the steps that we are about to show you. Suddenly you will experience a new level of mental abilities. Your motivation will skyrocket. Your ability to concentrate will sharpen. You will be able to solve the problems in your life that previously seemed overwhelming. 

Your comprehension of what you are reading will become deeper and quicker.  You will no longer have to read the same paragraph over and over to understand the meaning. You will begin to do math problems in your head again. 

Before enhancing your brain, you may have decided that you were unable to successfully compete, because you had lost your edge. After diligently following the advice in this book, your level of cognition will soar. You will be able to take care of business like never before. You will no longer be subject to the common problems experienced when thinking is declining. 

How to know if your brain is failing.

Your brain may be degenerating if you have any or all of these symptoms:

1. Fatigue.

2. Depression.

3. Gastrointestinal problems.

1. As the brain fatigues, the whole body fatigues. As the brain degenerates with age, endurance declines for ordinary tasks, such as reading and driving. These activities bring on extreme fatigue after shorter and shorter periods of time. Your book drops into your lap. You have to pull the car over and shut your eyes for a bit before continuing on.

2. Poor brain health causes depression. Your motivation is lost for activities that used to seem interesting. Your sense of well-being drifts away into feeling the blues.

3. Digestive complaints often result from brain degeneration. Gas, bloating, indigestion, acid reflux, constipation, diarrhea, belly pain, and irritable bowel syndrome are commonly caused by a failing brain. When these symptoms don’t go away, poor brain health may be the underlying cause.

Senior moments are your wake-up call.

Senior moments are your call to pay immediate attention. When you open the refrigerator and forget what you wanted in there, you may write it off as a senior moment and not take it seriously. . .

But you may want to reconsider.

Remember, when the brain deteriorates, it loses insight. You might not notice that your brain is failing. Don’t worry though; your problem will be clearly visible to everybody else. Others may notice a subtle drooping of the face on one or both sides. It becomes obvious to others that your mental processing has slowed, that you repeat yourself, or that your mood is becoming more negative. 

Don’t wait until it’s too late.

Brain destruction begins many years before (usually even decades before) serious brain diseases are discovered.² Serious brain diseases include Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, and vascular dementia. Begin to change your lifestyle now, before you develop any diagnosable brain diseases.

We have been taught to believe that nothing can be done once you get Alzheimer’s disease.  If told that you have it, you are counseled to get your affairs in order now while you can still make decisions, because you will not be able to make decisions as the disease progresses.

Unfortunately, this advice is still being given out. But, it does not have to be true. There is something that we can do.

Alzheimer’s disease is not only preventable, but is also reversible, especially in the early stages.³ Individualized programs can be developed to specifically address each person’s problem areas.

We can identify and address the causes. Many of these causes revolve around diet and lifestyle. Common causes include antibiotic use,⁴ prediabetes,⁵ obesity,⁶ and a sedentary lifestyle.⁷

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Immediately follow the action steps in this book to prevent and reverse cognitive decline, before it’s too late. You have a serious problem if you are experiencing the symptoms of the deterioration of your brain. If this is so, you need to act as quickly as possible to prevent further brain function decline, because by the time the problems can be definitely identified as Alzheimer’s type dementia, 80-90% of the brain tissue may already be degenerative. Anything that compromises this last 10-20% will produce major disabling symptoms requiring extended care facilities.

We tend to think that we will eventually get around to addressing the problem of memory loss. We may ignore the earliest symptoms of dementia, such as brain fog and depression, along with forgetting phone numbers or names or needing to make grocery lists. These are symptoms of neurodegeneration in areas of the brain involving memory. 

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disease involving the entire brain. Loss of focus, motivation, and depression, inefficient work habits, difficulty sleeping and staying on task are all serious symptoms of brain degeneration. If overlooked by family members or yourself, you may miss your chance to reverse the problem. 

If no action is taken now, your symptoms will probably progress over time.  If you notice that you are losing your memory abilities, think about how long you have noticed this and think how much it has progressed over the last year or over the last two years. This is a clue to how fast the brain degeneration is happening. You may notice that the degeneration is speeding up as time goes on. Next year will be even faster. 

Waiting until your memory declines even further is the worst thing that you can do. This is the mistake made by standard-of-care health care. If you notice symptoms, you must take matters into your own hands and not depend on your primary-care physician to act. 

If you are determined to get your brain working better, it won’t be hard. With diligent application of the strategies that you will learn in this book, your brain will reverse gears, bursting out of the sickening downhill slide of memory, mood, cognition, energy, and digestion, and into the recovery of lost abilities.

Follow the advice given in this book to stop your brain from degenerating further and to begin to rehabilitate your lost brain health. Learn how to prevent and reverse the progression of dementia and other cognitive problems in yourself and in your loved ones.

The lifestyle interventions that we are recommending only have upsides. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Be sure to follow the extremely valuable action steps given in Chapter 9 to begin rescuing your failing brain immediately.

Let’s get busy. There is no time to waste waiting for more serious symptoms to become apparent. We have work to do right now.

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

You walk into a room and forget why you went in.  You search your brain for your motive for entering that room. Drat, what was it that I wanted in here?  Is this early Alzheimer’s? When you can’t remember where you put your keys or your phone or your glasses or anything else, you may shrug it off as having a senior moment.  Or you may joke that the black hole got it. 

You forget to turn off the soup and go do something else. Later on the smoke alarms alert you to your oversight. You run to the kitchen and find a burned-up pot.

Your inner critic says, Oh no! How could I do something as stupid as that?  You don’t really want to think about why you burned up the soup. 

But then when it happens again, you may really start to question the health of your brain. And when it happens again for a third time, well, now you know you have a problem with remembering. 

The unspoken concern is that you are losing your mind.

It is wise to be concerned about your memory. You may begin to worry about traveling alone, even though you have traveled alone for many years without problems. But now, the brain fog and forgetfulness may make you forget critical details that may make you vulnerable. You may not be alert enough to pick up on cues that previously would have alerted you to danger. Drinking alcohol seems to make everything worse.

Or perhaps you have lost your ability to focus, and it is affecting your work. Younger men and women may be threatening to make you obsolete.  How can you get your edge back?

Perhaps your greatest fear is losing the ability to make decisions for yourself and thus, your independence. This may be a very real possibility, and it all starts with not remembering the names of people you know or whether or not you turned the sprinklers on.

How do you know if this is early Alzheimer’s or not? You don’t.

Alzheimer’s can’t be distinguished in its early stages by any known testing.  By the time you have abnormalities specific to Alzheimer’s, you have had the disease for decades.

If you are very young, you can worry about early-onset Alzheimer’s. If you have Alzheimer’s in your family, you might have reason to worry and to get testing. Or better yet, you can change your diet and lifestyle to a healthier one before any disease can be detected.

Beginning to forget things is something that you need to take seriously if your forgetting is getting more frequent or upsetting to you. Maybe the black hole really did get the lost item. The black hole could be the place inside your mind where your memories are hiding. 

The excuses you make for your oversights cannot hide the painful fact that YOU might be sliding down into the black hole of forgetfulness.  Many of us have watched our grandparents and parents take the big slide down into the black hole of dementia.  Eventually they fall so far that nobody’s home.

It can be scary to watch in your loved ones. You have to be constantly on alert to keep things running smoothly, when they can’t remember to do the things that you always counted on them to do.

And it’s really unnerving, when it is happening to you. You may feel like you are letting people down when you keep doing stupid things. 

We have all experienced occasional periods of forgetfulness. But when they become more and more frequent, we may start to wonder, What is going on? How can I correct the problem, before it gets even worse?

Memory slips are commonly caused by many things—depression, poor sleep, stress, fatigue, or inattention. So don’t freak out when you have these experiences. 

However, if they persist, becoming more frequent and noticeable, and/or if you have a family history of dementia and/or a history of head trauma, it might be appropriate to worry a little about these problems, until you take action and get help. If your friend or relative exhibits increasing forgetfulness—poor conversion of short-term to long-term memory—and shows not the least self-concern or laughing away the mistake, then they have lost insight and have significant dementia. 

These little memory slips may be just the beginning. This is how age-related mental decline begins. This is how serious diseases like Alzheimer’s disease start. In fact, brain changes that result in serious neurodegenerative diseases silently begin decades before the disease becomes apparent. My own mother’s story is a sickening example of what can happen to your brain function if you don’t work to maintain it properly.

Sliding into the black hole of dementia.

Let’s look at what happened to my mother’s brain. This is also what happens to the brains of countless people who have ever suffered from dementia.

Like most people, my own mother had no idea that her lifestyle was harming her health, especially her brain health. Mom was of the opinion that taking a daily multiple vitamin tablet was all that she had to do to keep from getting sick. She could not have been more wrong about that. Even if her body could break it down and absorb it, a multivitamin a day could never make up for her deadly diet and sedentary lifestyle.

Mom’s diet had inflamed her brain and starved it of essential nutrients. Her diet was totally devoid of healthy foods like fresh organic vegetables, wild-caught fish, grass-fed and grass-finished meats, pastured free-roaming chickens, and healthy fats.

Like many people, Mom believed the media hype that eating fat makes you fat and causes heart disease. So she strictly avoided eating healthy fats, like butter, olive oil, and whole milk, the building blocks that her brain could use to make healthy cell membranes. Instead, Mom cooked with rancid, highly-processed vegetable oils that were destroying her brain health.

Mom was a big fan of processed foods, including boxed cake mixes, Crisco, TV dinners, canned vegetables and fruits, margarine, sugary cereals, and all of the other Frankenfoods that line most of the shelves at the grocery store. She began her day with Wonder Bread coated with margarine and jelly, sugary cereal topped with skim milk and even more sugar, and an orange-flavored sugar drink (Tang). One look inside her refrigerator quickly revealed chemicalized fake foods like bottles of prepared salad dressings, artificial coffee creamer, and ice cream—processed junk that contained brain-deadly emulsifiers, trans fats, vegetable oils, and preservatives. Mom liberally imbibed in a vast array of processed foods, like soda pop, potato chips, and pretzels and loved to eat the nutrient-devoid treats to be had at the fast food places that were springing up everywhere.

She did not eat much meat, but the meat that she did eat was standard supermarket meat. These meats came from animals that were fed grains that were grown using herbicides and pesticides. The animals also were routinely given antibiotics, growth hormone, and anabolic steroids in their feed to fatten them up faster. All of these hormones and drugs were highly-concentrated in the meats sold in the grocery store. When she ate the chemical and hormone-laced meat, these drugs became even more concentrated in her body’s organs, including her brain.

As time went on, this way of eating dramatically increased the toxic burden all throughout her body. As the years passed, Mom parked herself in front of the TV in her Lazy-Boy chair for increasingly longer stretches of time, staying up late into the night watching TV. As she demolished countless bags of pretzels, bottles of Coke, and bowls of ice cream, she complained about being exhausted. 

When I pleaded with her to get up and take a walk around the block, she said that she was too tired to exercise. Any exercise was completely out of the question. The Lazy-Boy chair had become her prison. The day eventually came when she no longer had the strength to stand up on her own. She had to get one of those recliners that stand your body up for you so that you don’t even have to do that for yourself.

Her doctors gave her more and more different kinds of medications. Mom took meds to lower her blood pressure and her cholesterol, as well as little pink pills to steady her nerves. Who knows what all the rest of her pills were for? 

At first, Mom forgot to take her meds. Or she would take them twice. 

Many of us have made this mistake. My siblings and I weren’t too worried about her when this started happening. We got her one of those little plastic pill boxes with the days of the week written on each section and put her pills into each compartment, so that we could monitor her usage.

Things seemed to be going OK for a while. Gradually though, Mom did start doing troublesome things. She started hiding her most valuable possessions, just to keep thieves from getting them. (There was no problem with thieves.)

Then she began passing out with what the doctors said were mini-strokes. A mini-stroke is also called a transient ischemic attack (TIA). A TIA is a brief interruption of blood flow to part of the brain, spinal cord, or retina, which may cause temporary stroke-like symptoms.

During one TIA, she fell on her face and got pretty scraped up. Other falls resulted in a broken leg and a broken wrist. Her medications were not questioned as causes of the mini-strokes.

Her hormone deficiencies were not evaluated or treated. Her doctors had actually advised against bioidentical hormone replacement, which would have greatly helped her to cope with her inflammation.

I watched my mother become more and more confused, until she was unable to care for herself at all anymore. Her health-destructive lifestyle habits eventually led to dementia and many years in a nursing home.

After a few years, Mom’s mind took some shocking and dangerous new twists. Just to keep an eye on her, my brothers and sister took turns taking care of Mom in their homes. 

One cold summer night in Maine, it suddenly became obvious that we had to take more serious action to take better care of Mom. Mom had been staying with my sister in her cozy seaside cottage in Maine. Everyone had been sleeping peacefully throughout the chilly night . . . or so it seemed. 

Suddenly, at 3 am, the sound of the ringing doorbell split the quiet of the wee hours.  My sister and her husband were startled out of their sound sleep. They leaped out of bed and ran to the door to see who was there at that ridiculous hour.

The neighbors from down the street were standing on the front porch. They held our shivering, crying mother, who was wrapped in a blanket. They explained that they had discovered our mother wandering around the neighborhood naked, raving about her uncle abusing her. (He had been dead for over sixty years.)

It was fortunate that these caring neighbors had found her, knew who she was, and brought her back home. The severity of Mom’s mental situation had become glaringly obvious now. Next time we might not be so lucky.

For her own safety, we had to put mom into a secure extended-care facility.  Mom protested vehemently about this decision. She pleaded with us to let her go home. But going home had become impossible.

Mom could never go home again.

As her dementia deepened, the doctors said there was nothing that could be done for her. She had Alzheimer’s disease.

They could give her medications, but the doctors admitted that their drugs did not work very well or for very long. The medications that they offered might help temporarily, but would not stop or slow the inevitable continued deterioration of Mom’s mental faculties. 

After two years, Mom graduated from extended care to the nursing home. It tore me apart to watch her mental faculties dwindle. I felt helpless to do anything about it. I really was helpless.

When I went to visit her, Mom confided in me that the people who were caring for her were evil. This was not true. Her caregivers could not have been nicer. I considered them all to be saints. Without complaining a bit, they lovingly cared for those who could no longer care for themselves. But in Mom’s paranoid mind, they were out to get her. 

My mother’s ever-worsening dementia was heartbreaking.

Due to osteoporosis, Mom was incapable of lifting her head up enough to see in front of herself. Her strong heart still kept her alive. But her mind was gone for good.

The day finally came when she did not recognize me at all. I was a stranger to her. 

That was the day when I had to face the fact that my mother was really gone. I grieved her loss and went on with my life. She died several years later. But to me, Mom had finally left us on that sad day, when she no longer remembered who I was. 

I hated not being able to help my mother out of her predicament. I did not buy in to the doctors’ notions that nothing could have been done to help her. And neither should you. 

I decided that I would do my best to figure out what had happened to my mother’s mind.  I might be able to prevent this from happening to myself and others. So I began to devote my efforts to deciphering the mystery of what had happened to her brain. Her inattention to lifestyle habits is the most obvious place to start to explore, in order to find out why her brain degenerated.

Our lifestyle choices determine our risk for developing brain diseases that have no remedy. To prevent the development of a condition like Alzheimer’s, for which there is no effective treatment, let alone a cure, you must begin now to improve your lifestyle habits. 

Types of common brain disorders.

The standard-of-care medical establishment follows the dictum of, Diagnose and adios. If and when you develop a serious neurological disease, consulting a standard-of-care medicine doctor will help you to identify and name your disease, but that may be as far as it goes.

If it is Alzheimer’s disease, you will just be one of the 43 million people worldwide who have received this diagnosis. You cannot go to the pharmacy and get any medication that will effectively work to slow the devastation of Alzheimer’s disease.

Don’t wait to make changes until you have advanced symptoms of dementia.  Advanced symptoms of dementia are not being able to find your way home or to remember your children’s names.

Stroke.

When a stroke occurs, a blood clot or bleed in the brain’s arteries cuts off oxygen to the brain’s tissues. The lack of oxygen kills or severely injures those tissues, causing loss of physical or cognitive function.

Strokes mostly affect the elderly, but can occur in people in their forties or even earlier. Classically, a stroke leaves a person paralyzed on one side, unable to speak clearly, and needing a wheelchair. Smaller strokes may show up as only occasional forgetfulness, similar to the symptoms of MCI and early Alzheimer’s disease.

Many elderly people suffer from silent strokes, where the blood flow is impaired for brief periods of time.  Although these people may not experience any symptoms, these silent strokes cause a lot of damage and can be seen on MRI scans. These silent strokes increase risk for Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

Reduce the risk of stroke:

Keep blood pressure under control.

Stop smoking.

Exercise regularly.

Control diabetes. Insulin resistance significantly increases the risk of vascular dementia.⁸

Maintain a normal homocysteine level. Get tested. Elevated homocysteine can be controlled by taking a B-complex vitamin.

Eat fish.⁹

Know the signs of stroke and do not delay getting medical care. Call 911 if you have any of these symptoms. Do not try to drive yourself to the hospital.

Unexplained dizziness or feelings of unsteadiness.

Loss of vision, especially in one eye.

Loss of speech or difficulty in talking or understanding speech.

Any unexplained weakness or numbness in the face, arms, or legs, or on one side of the body.

A severe headache, unlike anything you have ever felt before.

Vascular Dementia.

Vascular dementia (VD) is caused by brain damage from impaired blood flow to your brain. VD occurs when one massive stroke or several small ones damage brain areas that store or relay information.

Stroke is a major risk factor for vascular dementia. Vascular dementia isn’t always caused by stroke, but the risk of developing VD in someone who has had a stroke is six to ten times greater than the general population.¹⁰  VD causes problems with reasoning, planning, judgment, memory, and other thought processes. VD makes up 15 to 25% of all cases of dementia. Depending on the severity of the causes, it can develop suddenly or slowly, taking up to 40 years to manifest.

Symptoms of vascular dementia include depression, confusion, migraine-like headaches, emotional problems like uncontrollable laughter or crying, inability to handle money, and loss of bladder or bowel control. It typically strikes between the ages of 60 and 75.  It can worsen significantly over just a few days. Like Alzheimer’s, it is strongly associated with diabetes. It is often associated with coronary artery disease and high blood pressure.

VD can be prevented by addressing the major stroke risk factors. The most common causes are high blood