The Quest for Cure of “Alzheimer's”: Reimagining the Goal by Changing Culture

This essay explores personal and cultural meaning in dementia through the respective stories of biomedicine, public health, and alternative worldviews, using Indigenous perspectives as a critical example. Since Alzheimer's visibility as a biomedical illness intensified in the 1970s, the disease has generated powerful narratives of scientific cure that are now limiting public discourse and appropriate social and ecological action. In this essay, our approach is rooted in the recognition that stories in their many forms (oral, written, embodied, and visual) and their associated metaphors create the semantic webs of words and actions that endow human beings with meaning. New stories from less medicalized spaces can both challenge the often-unrecognized limits and damaging behaviors of profit-driven, scientific reductionism and revitalize public and ecological health approaches based on expanded worldviews of individual, social, environmental, and indeed planetary health.