It’s exciting to watch new developments in medicine, especially when new treatments for diseases are developed. Unfortunately, there is no treatment that has any merit for Alzheimer’s disease. Think of it, this disease that affects close to 5.8 million Americans is a disease for which we have no meaningful treatment whatsoever. As many of you know, Dr. Dale Bredesen has pioneered a novel approach to Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than offering up a single treatment, he has created a multi-pronged program that is proving successful in reversing this disease. Yes, I’ll repeat, this program has reversed Alzheimer’s disease. I previously interviewed Dr. Bredesen about his book, The End of Alzheimer’s, and his new book, The End of Alzheimer’s Program, focuses more on providing hands-on information with respect to what each of us can do today to preserve our brains as well as what can be done for patients with existing Alzheimer’s dementia. Like the original book, I am certain that this new work will soon be a best seller, worldwide. And I was asked to provide its foreword, appearing below with permission: "Never before has the practice of medicine been as polarized by the dichotomy between reductionism and holism as exists today with relation to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Reductionism, as it is applied to the practice of medicine, takes the position that in order to best understand a disease process and ultimately formulate and implement an appropriate therapeutic intervention, both the disease and the intervention need to be reduced to the simplest operative parts and mechanisms. Many have credited the sixteenth-century French philosopher René Descartes with codifying this paradigm. Descartes, in part V of his Discourse, described the world as being nothing more than a clockwork machine that could be understood in its entirety through an exploration of its individual components. And clearly the progress of the science of medicine historically and in the present is deeply punctuated by landmark advances characterized by dedication to this approach. Whether we are speaking of Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, using a single-lensed microscope to discover animalcules (microbes), or the sequencing of the human genome, the underpinnings of Western medicine continue to honor the notion that looking deeper and deeper at constituent parts will ultimately provide a knowledge base that will reveal sought-after solutions to challenging disease processes. To be sure, microscopy led to an understanding of pathophysiology that directly resulted in wondrous advances leveraged for salubrious outcomes. But myopically engaging a philosophy centered on drilling down to unity in terms of parts and processes inevitably segues to sanctioning a therapy equally centered on the validation of the singular. Simply stated, embracing reductionism in medicine supports the ideology of monotherapy, the idea that the goal of modern medical research should be the development of single, magic bullets that are designed and marketed to counter single diseases. As Harvard physician Dr. Andrew Ahn put it in a paper exploring the limits of reductionism in medicine: Reductionism pervades the medical sciences and affects the way we diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases. While it has been responsible for tremendous successes in modern medicine, there are limits to reductionism, and an alternative explanation must be sought to complement it. As of this writing, no disease process highlights the limitations of a reductionist approach as it relates to therapy more than senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. To be sure, the deep dive to unravel the etiology of this now-epidemic disease has been under way for decades and underwritten by hundreds of millions of dollars. Applying a reductionist approach has indeed revealed fascinating mechanisms that are likely involved in what ultimately manifests as this disease that now affects 5.5 million Americans. But alas, no si