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Dementia Beyond Drugs: Changing the Culture of Care
by G Allen Power
2010 Health Professions Press
G Allen Power is an American doctor wholly converted to psychosocial approaches to understanding dementia. He is also a practitioner of the Eden Alternative approach of some years’ standing.
This book is a substantial volume of over 250 pages but when you see the dedication to people with dementia - “my greatest teachers” - you know you will be in capable hands. Power has read widely, and quotes Tom Kitwood, Dawn Brooker, Christine Bryden and Richard Taylor. Indeed, the book is full of quotations, and pen portraits of individuals with the condition and incidents involving them in positive ways.
The book is divided into three parts: the first looks at, and rejects, the pill as the solution to all problems for people with dementia. The second examines culture change and how this is to be achieved. The third looks at specific issues that arise and suggests strategies for coping with them.
The whole work is written in the spirit of the Maya Angelou quote: “You did then what you knew how to do, and when you knew better you did better.”
In short, it is an essential book with a mind-changing agenda.
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The Long Hello: the Other Side of Alzheimer’s 