Alzheimer’s Disease Can Be Prevented AND Reversed - William Nields

Jackie Simmons: 00:00:06

Welcome back to your brain on positive. All the love and support you need is residing inside of you. And we're going to make it easier to turn it on.

Jackie Simmons: 00:00:23

Welcome to your brain on positive. I'm Jackie Simmons, and I am your host. And today, oh my goodness, hang on, we're about to talk to by guest will Niels, hey, we'll what are we going to talk about?

William Nields: 00:00:38

We're gonna talk about some very important things about our brain and why we should not ignore certain signs and symptoms.

Jackie Simmons: 00:00:44

To introduce my guest, you're best known for something most people don't believe, which is that Alzheimer's can be prevented and reversed. That's correct. So, um, for anybody listening to this, we're going to take you into the world, according to will, based on his experience, his knowledge and the case studies, we're also going to talk about fact finding and myth busting along the way. Well, you may not know this, but I used to organize walks to raise awareness for the Alzheimer's Association. And when people said, Jackie, why, because I didn't have anyone in my family at that time dealing with any of the signs of Alzheimer's. And my attitude was, hey, it doesn't do me any good to train somebody's brain, which is what I'm known for is training people brains to release negative emotional history. So they can create something without all that baggage. doesn't do me any good to train somebody's brain, and then for them to lose those skills to something as preventable as Alzheimer's. And that's how I got on this bandwagon. What's your story? Well, why is this important to you?

William Nields: 00:02:03

Well, I'm a primary care doctor and a very preventatively minded primary care doctor. So I came through medical school and was trained in an allopathic model, whereby we sort of name it, blame it entertainment. So we kept our horizon illness, we say, this is the problem. And then we use pharmaceutical post surgical interventions to minimize the symptoms, or modify outcomes. But the truth is, is the model never really digs down to the root cause of illnesses. And that became pretty evident to me. So I was in my career much more attracted to some, some different ways of doing things, you know, things that are well based in science, for example, using lifestyle diet, exercise, stress management, to treat coronary artery disease,

Jackie Simmons: 00:02:54

well below lifestyle, diet, stress management and exercise. Okay, I just want to make sure I heard you correctly. Yes. Okay. Those are for coronary disease, though, that's a pretty well known protocol,

William Nields: 00:03:07

precisely, but not implemented in the clinics. And there's a long list of reasons why that might be. But I said about in my career, trying to teach patients, how they can implement that, and bringing that to people through the medical model. So diabetes, heart disease, even many things can be done to prevent cancer. So the big those were the top two killers, but the number three leading cause of death now it's the Alzheimer's disease. And if I go back to 2015, I had nothing that could really powerfully impact my patients that were starting to succumb to cognitive decline, dementia and Alzheimer's. And so when I heard the UCLA researcher Dale Bredesen speak about his protocols, in his early success, published a series of I think it was eight or 10 patients that he took back from the brink of Alzheimer's disease using a protocol brought them back to being functional, returning to work remaining independent. I was, I was very interested. And so after some due diligence, I decided to get trained in his protocol. And so 2016 I started slowly implementing the protocol into my clinic. And that has been a journey evolving to where I am now, where I now fully believe that Alzheimer's disease and dementia A is optional, shouldn't be prevented can be prevented. And my goal is will be prevented for everybody and be even for people that are already in that boat. A lot can be done to improve mental fog. Shouldn't improve quality of life. And I think what's most important is to really maintain independence.

Jackie Simmons: 00:05:05

Absolutely. I am watching the not so slow decline of one of my best friends who has been losing her independence. Yeah, a lot, a lot of time over the years. And now she's going to be 94 and a couple of weeks. So people were like, Yeah, this is just the expectation. And I'm like, Really, we can't do any better than this in this day and age than to expect that we're going to gradually lose our independence and lose our ability to make our own decisions. We can do better than that yet. I was very excited when you came on my podcast schedule. Well, it's like, yeah, let's do better. So if somebody is like Pooh poohing all of this saying, well, there's nobody in my family that's ever had cognitive decline, or dementia or Alzheimer's, I don't need to know this, what would you tell them?

William Nields: 00:06:07

Well, I would say, I certainly hope that you're correct. But I wouldn't take that to the bank, so to speak, I wouldn't bet on that. Because, you know, even for people without the dreaded APR e4 Gene, there's an eight to 10% lifetime risk of Alzheimer's. So that's not a game of Russian Roulette that I would want to play. And in any event, there are many processes that are going on in commonly in our society and people that contribute to slowing cognition, and less brain performance, and so forth. And and these things not only impact the brain, but they impact the entire body's health. So why wouldn't you want to do your best to take care of your health?

Jackie Simmons: 00:06:53

You know, I love that question. Why wouldn't you want to do it? And the first answer that popped into my head, I can't wait till some people start putting comments on this. Because the first answer that popped into my head is why wouldn't I want to do it? Because to do it, I'd have to admit that I was at risk for it.

William Nields: 00:07:14

That can be scary. But that's sort of not sort of this is why we're so driven to get this message out that it doesn't have to be scary, you know, Alzheimer's message. Yeah. It's a it's a long process with a long window of opportunity to intervene and prevent.

Jackie Simmons: 00:07:39

Okay, so it's a long process with a long window of opportunity. And people will still wait for signs and not my own experience. Through the team suicide prevention societies, people are not just waiting for signs, they're waiting for absolute proof before they take a step that might prevent or intervene is in Well, in my world of teen suicide prevention, there is a point where you've waited too long. Is there a point in your world around preventing Alzheimer's where someone you'd have to say they waited too long?

William Nields: 00:08:16

Unfortunately, still, yes. So there are people with very advanced Alzheimer's disease, the brain has atrophied significantly. And using our protocol, we have not been successful bringing them back to independence and fully functional life. I will say this, though, while we've always been very careful to explain that there's still there have been many people, families, patients that endeavor, in the hopes to improve function. And what what we see is that the protocol very much will improve quality of life and can can improve cognitive function in I think the most meaningful way is we see patients employing the protocol that are much more interactive with family members much more sociable, much less distressed. So the quality of life is very improved.

Jackie Simmons: 00:09:10

That's huge. And quality of a relationship. As I said, I have a very real life experience happening with my friend. And her ability to engage in a conversation is incredibly valuable to me. So that makes a lot of sense. If you're on a mission to wake up the world, to the fact that this can be prevented. It's very much paralleling my mission to wake up the world to preventing suicide, and I think we both have a similar take on it. I call it being at war. War spelled with two A's as in we're all at risk. And if you could get people to accept that, okay, they accept that there is a risk, what would be their first step to mitigate that risk?

William Nields: 00:10:05

Well, we recommend people over the age of 45, which is a time when our brain function is peaking, or as peak, generally speaking, and a time when a lot of the sort of degenerative processes they can happen in the body, your hands are starting, and you can pick them up. So at the age of 45, or older, we recommend people get a thorough evaluation. We call a Cognos capy.

Jackie Simmons: 00:10:34

Oops, sorry, a cog Naskh up, does it require the same kind of sedation as its namesake?

William Nields: 00:10:41

Yeah, absolutely not. Much less invasive than a colonoscopy. But similar to colonoscopy, which you're looking for early signs of colon cancer, and that tests I'm a big proponent of because it has, is absolutely impacting the death rate from colon cancer is declining. And again, it has there's a large window of opportunity takes 10 years for a polyp to grow into a cancer. So if you can identify those and snip them out early, you've prevented cancers. And even so even though a small percentage of the population is undergoing that test, we see the death rate declining, and I believe that's due to this long window of opportunity. with Alzheimer's disease, you have, at least in most cases, a 20 year window where these processes begin. And you can impact them along the way, before the before that diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is made, which is really an in stage late stage diagnostic diagnosis.

Jackie Simmons: 00:11:42

All right, I'm gonna pause you just long enough to go. I know that I can go to my primary care physician and requests to have a colonoscopy or colon cancer screening. Where does somebody go to get a colonoscopy.

William Nields: 00:11:58

So right now, it's, they're still fairly limited in the amount of people that have been trained in this approach. But gray matters. Health is a precision brain clinic. We're in Sarasota, and Jacksonville right now, when we see people virtually as well around the world.

Jackie Simmons: 00:12:17

All right, so we know that there's a window that is open, where people can actually find a way to get a colonoscopy. This is not something that's coming down the pike, it's actually available now. Okay, cool. All right. I love by the way, gray matters. Because this gray matter in the brain matters to me, and I'm more than little gray when I'm not on camera. So there we go, get out of that one, Jackie. So when it comes to step one, get a get a get a test, find out your baseline, just know your numbers, kind of you know, the same basic thing that wellness practitioners have been saying for a really, really, really long time, you kind of parallel what entrepreneurs are saying now, which is you have to measure it, you have to know your numbers, you have to know where you start. We're using a number system at the teen suicide prevention society with the know like and trust factor to help people understand how to get to know like and trust themselves better, because if you measure it, you can then improve it. So they get a colonoscopy, now they've got a baseline they can measure they've been measured, they can then improve. What's next.

William Nields: 00:13:42

It depends on what we find. So there may be some people with very significant risk factors, the very commonly high blood sugar, cardiovascular risk factors are found. And these are things that if found early, you have, I would say a lot more wiggle room to adjust your lifestyle and do that over time in a sort of a gentler fashion than somebody say who we find her severe coronary artery disease, and we've met up in the entire lifestyle. Now, that's a lot more intensive program.

Jackie Simmons: 00:14:19

Okay. So when you talked about this long window of opportunity, what I'm hearing and I'm not, you know, an astrophysicist or any of them, but it was it sounds like is that if you're further away from the actual event, in this case, Alzheimer's, you only have to course correct a little bit. If you're close to it, you may have to course correct a lot.

William Nields: 00:14:44

That's exactly right. Oh, cool. All right.

Jackie Simmons: 00:14:47

So I'm following I like this. But you made this what sounds like a correlation that the risk factors elevated blood sugar, which is a risk factor of other diseases and coronary heart disease. And the risk factor of course of a heart attack or a heart event. Does it related to Alzheimer's?

William Nields: 00:15:08

Absolutely. The, there's a, it's important to know this, if you look at dementia patients, over 50% of them have multi multimodal diagnoses, so more than half and we know this from the aging study where they did autopsy analysis of Alzheimer's patients and found that it was 54% of patients had two different processes going on in the brain. And the majority of those were vascular injuries. So when we talk about coronary artery disease, it's not specific to the heart, it's a vascular disease that the vascular system is distributed throughout the body. So it affects your brain and affects your kidneys, and everything.

Jackie Simmons: 00:15:56

Okay, so I didn't catch this in any of the things I've looked at before, this is really kind of fascinating. There are clues systemically in and around the body, not just where you might look for a cognitive test. Absolutely. Okay. All right. So let's take and stick with one scenario for a moment. And what I think we're going to want to do too, and I, we've got plenty of time for this. So here we go. Scenario one, I got kids that are on the high side of 40. So one of my kids decides to take a colonoscopy, and they'll do a colonoscopy, or whatever it is, the language escapes me. They come back, and they're like, they're middle of the road, nothing dramatic. What would be their next step?

William Nields: 00:16:49

So we wouldn't say fantastic. And you can follow back up on an annual basis similar that you that you would if you were, you know, an annual physical type thing checking in have any symptoms developed? Are there been any changes in lifestyle or any changes and in life, right, stress, or sleep? These are big, other pillars, brain health. And that may not be a full delve into cognitive health, like the prognostic P. But you may decide, you know, what, I want to repeat the neurocognitive testing online testing that we did. Just to track my numbers, this my memory still is sharp. Is my roof processing speed, still a sharp these types of things?

Jackie Simmons: 00:17:37

There we go. I love that. I'm a stress management consultant for the last three, almost four decades. So this is writing, where I love to play, stress and sleep, double checking what's changed, you know, somebody's automatic, somebody suddenly becomes the caregiver of a grandchild. Everything's off the table, because stress and sleep both one goes up, the other goes down. Yeah. All right. So now let's take another scenario, someone 65, they have a cognitive debate. And they find out that they're not processing quite as quickly as they used to. What would be typical that you would find going on? I know, we're talking typical and a wide spectrum, but let's create a case study.

William Nields: 00:18:30

So that's great. I love the way you say that there's a wide spectrum. And so we subtype that processes into five major subtypes, okay. So you have inflammatory processes, you have glyco toxic process. processes such as you know, high blood sugar, insulin resistance, you have trophic factors, which are the nutritive support for the brain. This would be like, the analogy that I can best use is the soil that supports your garden. Do you have enough hormonal support for the brain, certain vitamins and nutrients? Is that there? And then you have I mentioned vascular, there's trauma, and then there's a big one that's a little trickier to pin down and I think this is much bigger than previously appreciated, which is toxicity.

Jackie Simmons: 00:19:27

I'm hearing a lot about things that might fall into that toxicity bucket. So at age 65, what what like I said, well keep a case study. Alright, so this person has come in, they've got they're above the inflammation. They're below on the glyco they're okay on the nutrients. They don't have any real vascular trauma. But their toxicity is wonky. Like he said, it's hard to pin down, but it's just like sending some some warning signals. Why would they be doing that?

William Nields: 00:20:02

Sure. So we always have to find the root cause and then eliminate the root cause. And then we use the body's natural detoxification processes to eliminate those toxins. And so to identify that we're looking at symptoms, we do a pretty big symptom questionnaire that's looking for perhaps neurological symptoms, vertigo, headaches, mental fatigue, these types of things, we can take a look at some blood work, and there may be certain signals that aren't approved, but their little red flags that say, Hey, maybe we should look here, you know, the bone marrow is kind of suppressed, you're all your blood counts are on a low normal, your zinc level is suppressed, your triglycerides are really, really low. These are if you combine all of those, that's sort of a pattern recognition that people have learned over the years, they can indicate possible toxicity. So then with the history, you can look at look for things like mercury, we can look for things like mold, we can look for environmental toxins. And we often do that through testing certain, you know, body fluids, or hair and various different ways that you can try to measure that.

Jackie Simmons: 00:21:12

Got it. Alright, so I love the fact that there are five sort of areas that you look at, and I'm

Jackie Simmons: 00:21:23

unpacking the medical language in my head going okay, multimodal, meaning you got more than one thing going wrong in your body at the same time? Did I get it?

William Nields: 00:21:33

That's exactly right. It's so simple as one little thing, there's one common denominator and all Alzheimer's patients are the same, you know, that type of thinking is just not going to get us anywhere.

Jackie Simmons: 00:21:47

Got it. All right. So looking at the different areas of inflammation. I have my own theories about the stress and inflammation and autoimmune disorders connection with stress management. So I, I do lots of fun stories around that, because I think it's a big overlooked component. You talked about sugar. And you know, the sad Standard American Diet certainly leads most people or many people to having those issues at some point in their life. When you talked about the nutritive support of the brain, I was thinking you eat your fruits and vegetables and mind your proteins and you come back with hormones. Tell me a little bit about how hormones provide nutrients to the brain. I'm just gonna pause everybody. I know I was going through all five, but we're taking a pause. Okay, how do hormones help put nutrients in the brain.

William Nields: 00:22:46

Hormones are very important for sort of a structural base. For example, if you look at testosterone, it's very helpful to maintain synaptic connections in the brain. So if somebody is testosterone production is suppressed below physiologic levels, the synapses do not have all the tools they need to maintain those connections. synapses are the connections between neurons in the brain. That's the ability for thoughts to occur as these electrical impulses are sent neuron to neuron throughout the brain. Estrogen extremely important for women. If you look at the sudden removal of estrogen, for example, in a woman who's had an overactive oophorectomy when they remove the ovaries surgically, if you don't supply a replacement hormone, that woman has nearly a double, two fold increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. And that is from Mayo Clinic observational data. And because there is a feedback loop, when you remove estrogen, suddenly the brain sort of goes into what seems to be a defense mechanism of pruning back, batten down the hatches, so to speak, and the neurons start to die off and trim sort of to protect core functions, it seems so so we see that, okay, whoa, whoa.

Jackie Simmons: 00:24:09

Like this could be maybe a warning label, put on any kind of surgery that would remove a woman's ovaries so that she would know that this doubles her risk of Alzheimer's? Yeah, I don't think that's a disclaimer that many women are given.

William Nields: 00:24:28

That's true. And you know, this is that people would probably say, Well, this is observational data from, you know, just it's not been proven. No correlation does not prove causation. And there's truth to that. But when you combine that with the known biological mechanisms of action, I don't believe it's wise to wait for that study to be done because nobody's really been interested to do that study. So when you come Find that observation. Just a simple observation, a woman that's had her ovaries removed and doesn't receive. Hormone replacement has nearly a two fold risk of Alzheimer's over the course of her life. And when we look at why, why would that be? It just focuses around a central signaling protein in the brain called amyloid precursor protein. And this gets pretty technical. What it is, is a protein on the membrane of our neurons, that sort of acts as a gateway. So it's known as an integrative switch. So it collects information from multiple factors and decides perhaps things are good, and we're gonna maintain a strong, healthy brain, or perhaps there's a lot of problems, we're under threat. So we're going to switch and we're going to set up a series of cascading events that says, We need to prune back for reserve core functions, and we lose neurons and there's synapses. And for and for women, that estrogen is an extremely important factor in that integrative switch of which way it will be cleaved.

Jackie Simmons: 00:26:11

This is interesting because we've tapped into the fear factor. It sounds like the brain is reacting to a switch that says we're under attack is what your language Yeah. So so the brain in fear, whatever is happening, biochemically, starts to shut itself down starts to shed the non essential systems.

William Nields: 00:26:38

Yes, and that's my language, because that's how I understand what seems to be going on. I don't understand any other explanation of why the brain would do this.

Jackie Simmons: 00:26:48

Well, I'm a big believer that our brains on stress, even on neutral, are just nowhere near as functional as our brain on positive. And I think I mentioned before we started that the name of the podcast, your brain on positive was inspired by a TEDx talk by Harvard professors, Sean Aker, he's known as the happiness professor. And he said in his TEDx talk, that your brain on positive is 31% more productive than your brain on negative, neutral, or stressed. And I think that's so misunderstood. People think if they can just calm down and get to neutral, that they'll be good, but that's not L. That's not your best, your best is when you can get your brain with all of it synapses firing. So I had no clue there was this big hormonal connection

William Nields: 00:27:44

is a piece of the puzzle. And for some people more of a piece of the puzzle, and some people less than a piece of the puzzle. But it's certainly a piece of the puzzle. And I wholly agree with what you're saying. Stress has been shown many, many times. I mean, there's these studies looking at mothers in World War Two, that caring for babies in these horrific circumstances, their hippocampal parts of their brain are shrunk. So they've lost that part of the brain encodes memories, and is so important for our short term memory. And that's a direct effect of chronic stress. high cortisol levels,

Jackie Simmons: 00:28:25

high cortisol levels are a direct effect of chronic stress. I absolutely believe that. And they are a huge trigger for inflammation for digestive disorders for the laundry list, but I'm going to come back to your list. Okay, so we touched a little bit on inflammation, the glyco connection, the sugar connection, the nutrients and stuff, then we get into vascular. And you're right, my thought about coronary heart disease had to do coronary disease had to do with the heart. And that's what my family has going on. You know, we have a family history of coronary events, but they've always been related to the heart. You're talking about the whole venous system, the whole veins and arteries throughout the whole body. And that now there's this connection of if you've got something going on in your veins, you might have something going on in your brain.

William Nields: 00:29:22

Yes, so just a quick finer point. Technical point, arteries feed the Oregon so they take blood from the heart out to the organs. Those are really the vessels were concerned about with atherosclerosis, the blockages of these arteries are the dysfunction of these arteries. The veins return blood, they're they're important. They take sort of deoxygenated blood, blood containing waste products back to the heart and lungs. Okay, so the arteries are the the really big player here, and it is a systemic issue. So, to illustrate this point, a lot of people don't know this. But back pain is actually one of the first indicators can be one of the first indicators that you have vascular disease. And that's because degenerative disc disease. And I'm just shocked at how many even neurologists, neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeon is operating on the spine don't really understand this. But the small little arteries coming off the aorta, which is the big artery, about as big as your thumb coming down the middle of your body, it feeds the spine, the tiny little arteries level by level that come off. And at these junction where the artery branches off, there's a lot of turbulence. And so over our life, that turbulence can create the blockages in the arteries, okay, where bloods gets blood flow gets limited to the spine. And so, vascular surgeons are aware of this, when you do a aortic operation, you open the aorta, and you can see the back of the aorta, there's these pinhole arteries coming off in a very specified pattern. Now, people with atherosclerosis, you see those arteries occluded. And I remember as a, as a early medical student and resident thinking, how is the spine getting any blood, I mean, these arteries are completely blocked. And it turns out that it doesn't. And so there's this correlation with atherosclerosis of those tiny little spinal arteries due to due to the sheer turbulence from high flow velocity down the earth, into the small little vessels with degenerative disc disease. So people have weakened tissues, they lift up something heavy, and they think, Oh, it's just because I lifted something heavy that I pop my disc, but it can be a sign that actually those vessels are compromised. And then the next size, arteries are the arteries that lead to the genitalia and then the heart. So we see, in vascular clinics, a lot of attention is paid to these other areas as warning signs that there could be heart disease, the brain is highly sensitive to loss of blood flow, because it is a it is a energy hog, it takes 30% of our glucose, it takes a massive amount of our blood supply, because it's 15% of our blood supply. Don't quote me on that. And when those blood vessels start to become choked off, the brain really starts to struggle. And we see this very commonly on MRIs, where you see these little white spots on an MRI in what's called the white matter. And radiologists will call this small vessel ischemic disease. And it's so common that it's generally ignored by practitioners. But more and more the studies, or and it's now out, I mean, there are studies that correlate these wave spots with progressive loss of cognitive function. So when when we see these white spots, we think, as a clinician, okay, there's not been a big stroke, that's just a chronic process. I don't have anything in my algorithm for that. So it's generally ignored away. A lot of people think about this in medicine, but we're saying you shouldn't be ignoring that that is a sign of vascular injury, most of the time, there are some other things that can cause those lesions on your MRI. But when the blood supply starts getting choked up to the brain, and those neurons aren't getting enough blood, they start to deteriorate. And you see that on the MRI. So that's small vessel disease. And it's associated with progressive loss of brain function over time. And then, of course, there's the big problems where you have a blood clot that obstructs an artery and kills a bunch of tissue, and you lose the function of that tissue. Those are strokes TAs. Yeah, and so that's vascular.

Jackie Simmons: 00:33:55

The connection between it all is something that I'm starting to piece out into my head. So if it is all connected, and we touched a little bit on the toxicity, which was the fifth one, if it's all connected, so it's not all nurture. But certainly toxicity is mostly the environment that we're in. And it's not all nature. It's not just our genes, even though there's been a lot of talk about that one gene that the you know, oh, if you have this, you're in trouble. I've got a friend going through clinical trials because they have that one gene. They don't have any other symptoms, but now they're volunteering, to test some new drugs out and I'm like, wow, there's a lot of fear around the potential of our losing our cognitive function, losing our independence, that's driving people to make decisions that they don't know they have other options. I think that's why I was so excited when our mutual friend Michael, Jen said, Hey, why don't you interview? Dr. Well, Mike? Well, absolutely, let's have a conversation about this, because in a very short period of time, you've laid out a very, very different perspective on what is really not very well understood. So lifestyle, diet, stress management, and exercise are the four things that we know will improve all of those areas. And it's so very, very simple. If there was one place people could go, that you would say, was reputable, that they could just say, Hey, if you want to be healthy, or for the rest of your life, including your brain, you know, these are the four things lifestyle diet, stress management and an exercise and these are places you can go. Or is that the problem? There are so many places people can go for this information. They get confused, and a confused mind doesn't make a decision or take an action. What would be better than them? just Googling and going out? And finding things randomly?

William Nields: 00:36:12

was an interesting question. You know, I think there's a lot of people doing very good work in this area, I can speak for our clinic, we, we feel that having a primary care approach is extremely important. Because, as you alluded to, with stress, and knowing that patient on a personal level, is extremely important, you have to understand all of these, what people call social determinants of health, you know, if they're homeless and living under a bridge, it's going to change your conversation. And let you know, as opposed to somebody that's got disposable income. So having that primary care, understanding we feel is incredibly important. It also prevents this sort of siloed approach to healthcare that we see as problematic, where everybody is a hyper specialist in their area, but they're not making these connections systemically. So I think that somebody with a general approach like that is important. And then somebody that understands these things that has been trained in these areas. I think we call it lifestyle medicine, functional medicine, that goes a long way, specifically, with brain health, it is extremely complicated. And there are so many different nuances and and I think you can come at you can come to that from many different, different pathways. Okay. But as far as I'm not aware of anybody that is comprehensively doing it, an approach like this, like we are.

Jackie Simmons: 00:37:49

So the one of the big things for me, is that you all are mythbusting, not just Alzheimer's, but the traditional approach to medicine. And I loved how you expressed it, that it's a name it, blame it, tame it, approach. And while we have a lot of tools at our disposal now to tame the symptoms of illness, and disease, prevention is still not the primary conversation. And I would love to help you all change that. That's why I was so excited that you could join me here today, because I believe in pure prevention, and you have a path laid out that people can follow. So if you're under 45, hey, start paying attention to your lifestyle, your diet, your stress management, and your exercise. And if you're 45 or over, start hunting around, you might be time to get a cognitive copy. cannot split the clip. I'll let you pronounce it.

William Nields: 00:38:57

God Damn skippy.

Jackie Simmons: 00:38:59

Thank you. Thanks

William Nields: 00:39:00

a little bit.

Jackie Simmons: 00:39:01

And thank you for being willing to come on the show and to share this story with us. I have one quick question for you. Why is this so important to you, that you've devoted a lot of your professional life to?

William Nields: 00:39:18

Well, I think that there is nothing more heartbreaking to see family struggle with loved ones going through Alzheimer's disease, and it's such a vacuum right now in the health system. I mean, my perspective as a primary care doctor was it was terrible. I had I knew people were showing signs of cognitive decline, and I had nothing to offer them of any meaningful substance. So I felt the best thing was to ignore it because otherwise everything ends up being sort of punitive to that patient and to to have to be helpless and stand by idly watching people steadily decline. was very terrible. And then you combine that with the personal toll and people, you know, because when you have an Alzheimer's patient and their caretaker, you really have two patients in the room. So it's just heartbreaking to watch a spouse in tears watching their loved one dissipate in coming to the point where they don't recognize them.

Jackie Simmons: 00:40:23

It's a terrible thing I will my partner Mark went through it with his mom. And he remembered very clearly the day that she stopped recognizing him. But you hit upon something that I want to highlight your you're feeling helpless, as a physician. This wasn't what you became a doctor for, to stand by and helplessly watch someone decline and watch the whole family potentially implode. That's not why you got into medicine. And yet so many people in the medical profession are facing this extreme frustration on so many fronts. I just want to highlight you, I want to tell everyone who's in the medical field to if followed the path if you're frustrated with what's currently available, consider what else is possible. Because I feel like that's what you've done, and the rest of us will benefit. So thank you Dr. Wells for coming on the show.

William Nields: 00:41:27

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Jackie Simmons: 00:41:31

Hang on everyone. The ride always gets more interesting from here.