It started as a typical class. I was lecturing on Alzheimer's dementia to students enrolled in my advanced physiology/pathophysiology course. With the exception of class being video-conferenced (COVID-19 restrictions), the presentation was not unlike previous iterations, presented many times throughout my career. I had just covered the potential neurological mechanisms associated with the disease and had progressed to the segment on the common clinical manifestations of Alzheimer's--the loss of short-term memory and executive decision-making capabilities.
It was somewhere at this point in my talk that I started thinking of my father. He had died from Alzheimer's (almost to the day) a year prior. As you may imagine, I started feeling emotional, and by the time I was describing some of the more severe manifestations of the disease, i.e., the inability to chew and swallow, I was overtly crying in front of a class of 70 students. My father went through those terrible stages.
I have been through many difficult classroom situations in my twenty-five years as a university professor--but crying in front of the class--that was a circumstance I had never prepared for. While I explained the reasons for my emotions to the group, it was only in their gracious, encouraging smiles that I was able to find the strength to continue through the remaining two hours of class. While difficult, I was reminded of an important message--disease is not just a series of pathophysiological facts. Disease is a force. Disease is personal.
While I have always paraphrased Dr. Bernie Segal (Love, Medicine and Miracles, 1984), '...that patients are more than a conduit between the IV and the urinary catheter,' when I logged out of class that day, those words were never more significant. My father was more than a man with Alzheimer's--so much more--my greatest teacher and an excellent musician.
While the above seems obvious, we in the biological sciences often lose track of the whole person. Because the body is so complicated, we have little choice but to isolate our thinking of disease down to subcellular and genetic pathophysiologic mechanisms. While reductionist scientific thinking has led to incredible discoveries that have improved the health and well-being of society; the process of reductionist science, at least for me, has often yielded a dehumanizing effect. While I fully acknowledge that we are biophysical creatures, operational in the realm of complex subcellular interactions…I also think we are a bit of magic. That is to say, there are elements of our lives that cannot be determined by the scientific method (at least at this moment in time).
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