LIHUE — Girl Scout Chloe Sakai of Troop 823 wasn’t in school Thursday morning.
Instead, Sakai was experiencing what it felt like to be a pioneer — a “Dementia Friend.”
Sakai was introduced by Mayor Derek S.K. Kawakami during the Dementia Symposium hosted by the county’s Agency on Elderly Affairs as being the trainer and certifier for the county’s department heads and leaders in becoming Dementia Friends.
“The county, through its Agency on Elderly Affairs, is committed to raising awareness of Kauai’s kupuna and others living with dementia who sometimes need a helping hand to go about their daily lives and feel included in their community,” Kawakami said.
The Dementia Friends Hawaii program, an initiative of Age-Friendly Honolulu, aims to give people an understanding of dementia, and the things they can do to make a difference.
Sakai embarked on the “Dementia Friend” project for a Girl Scout award.
Dr. Ritabelle Fernandez of Oahu, an associate professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said anyone can be a dementia friend.
“It all starts with aloha, and aloha begins with me,” Fernandez said.
As the nation matures, more businesses are starting to respond to the impact of dementia on customers and employees. Strategies have started to address the questions on how to meet the needs of customers with dementia and their care partners as well as the needs of employees caring for someone with the disease.
Kauai is home to an estimated 72,000 residents, of which about 14,500 are kupuna aged 65 years and older. One in nine of Kauai’s kupuna are projected to be living with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
“Everyone, both young and young at heart can become a Dementia Friend,” said Sakai, whose motivation for learning more was her grandparents, whom she noticed where having an increase in their difficulties with daily life.
“The goal of a Dementia Friend is to help everyone on Kauai understand five key messages about dementia, how it affects people, and how we can each make a difference in the lives of people living with the disease,” she said.
Those five key messages are:
w Dementia is not a normal part of aging, and not everyone who grows old will develop it;
w Dementia is caused by diseases of the brain, the most common being Alzheimer’s;
w Dementia is not just about having memory problems. It can affect thinking, communication, and daily tasks;
w It is possible to have a good quality of life with dementia;
w There is more to the person than the dementia.
Dementia Friends is a global movement that was developed in the United Kingdom and is now underway in the United States, Hawaii being in the preparing stage for becoming Age-Friendly.
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Dennis Fujimoto, staff writer and photographer, can be reached at 245-0453 or dfujimoto@thegardenisland.com.
Aloha Kakou,
As a brief description, or to briefly explain, Dementia is like Cancer, and in that, like Cancer, dementia has a list of Caregories and Alzheimer’s Disease is just one disease on the list, just like Cancer has: Lung Cancer, Colo-Rectal, Prostate, Pancreatic, Breast, Uterine, Liver, Stomach, etc., etc., ; in fact Cancer can now be diagnosed or found in many other places of the body.
So too, Dementia has other sub-categories like Alzheimer’s Disease, memory loss, disorientation, mobility problems, and many more.
What is interesting is that the Cause of these diseases is not mentioned, nor is the search for the Cause. There is discussion of symptoms, areas of the brain impacted, etc., but Cause seems almost not an important issue, when Cause is the entire issue when it comes to any disease.
There is much work being done to find new chemical drugs and petrochemicals to suppress or hide symptoms of these diseases. The search for drugs seems in most disease cases to always, year after year, need a newer drug, to be more effective, and having less harmful side effects, and take over for the prior drug that did not work.
With the amount of money spent on drug treatment research and experimentation on humans, the very patients as guinea pigs, each year, it would seem a portion of that money could or would be spent in finding the Cause.
Drugs for disease treatments are made up of isolated or mixtures of chemicals. Many of these chemicals are from petrochemicals (petroleum oil from oil wells and coal mines) due to the ease and low cost vs. profits of isolating and mixing the chemicals in laboratories, to then mass produce the drugs for the pharmacies.
In searching for the Cause of Diseases, the one thing all people with Diseases have in common is that they eat food, every day, and often 3 meals of it, and in addition on the go, or break time, snacks.
Since now a days almost all food has chemicals and/or petrochemicals in them, and even food with its own covering like bananas, apples, oranges, that is foods that may need peeling before you eat it, well apples don’t need peeling, but still these foods come with chemical sprays on them, and even bananas come with exposure to gasses that accelerate their ripening when picked too early for shipment.
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We’ve all heard about don’t mix alcohol with medical drugs for both the reasons of causing the drug to be ineffective, and as well due to the reason of it being dangerous.
And also prescription drugs, which are just another isolation or combination of chemicals and petrochemicals, and add to that the over the counter drugs, and you can have a dangerous cocktail when mixing drugs, chemicals, and petrochemicals in prescriptions…ask your pharmacists about safety precautions. Many people take 4 or more different prescription drugs a day, even separated by hours of taking them, in the body it still becomes a cocktail of drugs.
We just mentioned that there is one common thing all people with disease do and that is that they eat food, and of that food there is several varieties at each meal.
If you read the FOOD INGREDIENTS, we call it the WARNING LABEL, just like the warning labels on bug sprays and weed killers have WARNING LABELS, you will find packaged, canned, bottled, and even frozen and bakery goods have numerous chemicals and petrochemicals in their ingredients.
In a single day you may ingest into your body as many as 50 or more of these chemicals and petrochemicals (which the latter are carcinogenic or cancer causing) from all the varieties of foods eaten including the desserts and snacks as well. Over 50 chemicals a day.
“Don’t mix drugs” seems, therefore, to hardly be a concern of the food industry manufacturers, which some of the food surely is…manufactured…not grown. But since food manufacturers are not trained Pharmacists, how would they know what is safe in such massive dosages as over 50 chemicals and/or petrochemicals a day and then mixing those food additives with prescription and over the counter medicines each day. A Witch’s Brew for sure.
Day after day, after month, after year, after decade and decades, of mixing drugs, chemicals, and petrochemicals into your body, is there any question that this routine behavior is an at risk daily procedure the population at large takes for granted.
Almost no food, on any shelf in any grocery store escapes this madness of chemical and petrochemical combinations as additives. And if you want proof, look for yourself. Worse, there are efforts at the National level to not list all the ingredients. For some odd, or macabre, reason they want to hide some of the things they are putting into our food. Sounds like a Sci-Fi movie.
Over a lifetime, albeit shortened for some, we are, through Blind Faith and Blind Trust coerced Into ingesting over a million doses of chemicals.
After these chemicals enter our body and are whisked off by the vast network of the blood’s arterial system as molecules to the far interior reaches of our organs and brains (even your toe nails and hair); is there a mystery or any wonder that we have horrible things happen (ill side effects) to our organs (cancer), and our brains (dementia and Alzheimer’s) while these laboratory chemicals and oil well and coal mine derived petrochemicals are circulating within the body’s tissues made up of our precious functional, and really miraculous, cells. Cells that all do different tasks and duties like a million musical instruments in a Symphonic Orchestra using the human nervous system as the Maestro keeping it all working in precision and perfection.
Is it any wonder that so many people are so sick with so many diseases and illnesses and the standard of disease care is the daily taking chemicals and petrochemicals as a solution, with the one, petrochemicals, known to cause cancer.
So why is the vast majority of the monies supposedly spent on Health Care actually being spent on Disease Care and Chemical and Petrochemical research.
Why isn’t the majority of that money spent on looking for the Cause and Prevention of Disease.
Why is the one proven Cause of cancer, the tobacco/nicotine, a drug mixture, being tolerated for sale on every street corner store when it is costing the non smoking tax payers too much of their pay check; and the deceitful lure is there for the Kids to take up smoking or the association of it with E-cigarettes whose flavors are petrochemicals and are carcinogenic. Smoking, that is, inhaling vanilla or strawberry, etc., flavored smoke into your lungs is Accumulation Suicide by lung cancer. What fools these (young) people be…they must be uneducated as to their bodies and the poison of the chemicals they are inhaling as if it was nothing.
But getting back to the WHY’s of doing this and not doing that…
Why do we “trust” a Disease Care System, who earns $4 Trillion dollars a year in just America alone, a System of doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies and their foundation of chemical and petrochemical companies, and who are entirely dependent on people getting sick and staying sick, for their $4 Trillion dollar Income…
Why do we TRUST that “bass ackward” (get the disease and we’ll be there to treat you later) profit based Disease Care System with our Health?
Apparently the WHY is beyond almost all of the people, considering how many still participate in Disease Care.
Is there a single Presidential candidate not pushing for Universal (Disease) “health” Care, Medicare (disease care) for all. The focus is on Disease with whoever you talk to, nothing said about the daily proactive needs of people to be and stay Healthy.
If you fill a glass to the top with water (Health), there is no room or need for oil (petrochemical drugs). Participate in and focus on your own Health and forget about Disease Care.
How can people or keiki understand the needs for their body’s Health, when they are not educated about their bodies. School curricula must change to the needs of the people. Let’s start with our youth and let them take that Health education back home to their families. Learning about the body is Health education.
Being a friend to any sick person is the work of God, but being a friend to a disease is not the right path to finding its Cause and Prevention.
Being a friend to disease is giving the disease daily drugs that tries to hide its symptoms yet allowing the disease to continue on for the rest of a shortened life.
If this is all our doctors can do is prescribe chemical and petrochemical drugs we need to replace their system. We Deserve Better and do do the sick people which is apparently 80% of the population on drugs.
The Heroes of Health are those keeping people Healthy.
We as a people deserve that real scientists find the Cause and Prevention of all these Disease Effects and making the Cause Prevented.
Dear Mr. Phony Name,
You really don’t have any idea what you are talking about.
It’s really sick how you casually accuse people who spent a good part of their lives achieving advanced educations and work long hours all in the name of helping mankind, of being pawns in some vast petrochemical conspiracy (it would require an impossible 100% BTW)!
This is based on nothing but your sick imagination.
Then you promote your own quack theories also based on imagination.
SICK!
Aloha Kakou,
May we add that prior to the birth of petrochemicals in around 1925 by the Standard Oil Company in New Jersey, petrochemicals were unknown to the human race at large or any other species on earth. That is, less than 100 years ago the monster-ization of petrochemicals reared it’s ugly head and is now ubiquitous, that is, or everywhere, on earth…and petrochemicals also account for a huge amount of pollution impacting the environment today…air, water, land, and people and other species, some of which already have gone extinct.
For example, The Great Pacific Gyre, a patch of floating and semi floating plastic garbage, all of it made from plastic throwaways and is 3 times bigger than FRANCE which may be bigger than California.
But petroleum is also made into food additives and medical drugs all of which go inside human beings by eating or swallowing them or injection of medicine and vaccines, these petrochemicals have never entered human body’s or other species in the history of the earth, which historically is a long story, very long story without mention, till now, of foreign substances made from petrochemicals.
All vertebrates, which are the humans, and all the animals with spinal bones (vertebra) housing and protecting their neuronal spinal cord as it comes out of the brain, wherein also the brain is protected by a bony helmet, these vertebrates all have immune systems, and 24 hours a day their immune systems clear whatever foreign substances are found in the body. Even while you are sleeping your immune system is clearing out of your body foreign substances. Petrochemicals are foreign substances. Petrochemicals are in your food and medicines.
The immune system first identifies a foreign substance, every foreign substance, they are called antigens, and sets about by several methods to eliminate everyone of them by en eventual excretion from the body. All foreign objects are considered the “enemy”, no matter how they enter a vertebrate’s body, the vertebrate uses its own immune system to rid the body of the foreign substance.
A few of these defensive cells ridding the body of foreign substances are called 1, agglutinins, 2. precipitators, 3. neutralizers, 4. opsins, 5. lysins, 6. and antibodies. Yes we humans make our own Antibodies, and they are part of our immune system.
Interesting because medical prescription Antibiotics when swallowed or injected, as well as vaccines injected into people, they are also recognized by the body as a foreign substance and the body needs to rid itself of Antibiotics and Vaccines in spite of the reactions they cause.
There are many more types of defensive cells the immune system uses to rid the body of foreign substances like unwelcome bacteria and virus.
Chemicals and petrochemicals are such foreign substances that the body must eliminate by gathering them up so to speak and excreting them.
When you ingest, inhale, or allow foreign chemicals into your body whether by intention or mistake or invasion, for example like with an open wound, the immune system continues its work to rid your body of these chemicals.
But let’s say the petrochemicals in food…when you take in 10 chemicals at breakfast, that is not 10 substances, those are 10 types of foreign substances, the exact amount of molecules of this foreign substances can be in the millions.
In other words a single meal may require eliminating millions of foreign substances that humans have never been exposed to since the beginning of man on earth. The problem is that the human race has not adequately adapted to this task of eliminating new chemicals on earth.
Petrochemicals have only been around less than 100 years and the human immune system has not had enough time to evolve and adapt to this relatively overnight calamity and onslaught of foreign substances entering our bodies, and while in a lifetime you may be exposed to a million and a half total petrochemical exposures in your food and prescription or in over the counter drugs, the amount of each petrochemical molecules may be a million times or more in number as individual foreign substances, certainly an overwhelming job of an immune system that has not had enough evolutionary time to adapt to removal of these foreign substances.
What happens to the human body UNadapted to these perhaps a quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or more) of foreign substances over a life time?
Well we don’t know for sure. But what we do know for sure is that whether coincidentally, but certainly simultaneously, the human immune system has failed to defend itself from an onslaught of modern cancers and a host of other NEW Chronic Degenerative complex Diseases, brought on by a cause so new it continues to today to perplex science who think from the standpoint of a Disease Care System instead of a Health Care System.
A Disease Care System that allows, or ignores, the severity of entry into the human body of foreign substances, foreign substances never before seen or experienced by mankind, and are at face value known to cause cancer yet are ignored by the mainstream participants of the Disease Care System, who prefer you to be sick than healthy, in order that they may continue to use similar foreign substances to be put into your body, foreign substances, medicines and vaccines, that have never been known to man prior to over 100 years ago.
Science knows that petrochemicals, and even some other natural chemicals, are carcinogenic, they cause cancer, yet our AMERICAN Disease Care System ignores this threat and says very little if anything to people to avoid these foreign substances to the point where it prevents disease.
The Standard American Diet is so full of chemicals, petrochemicals, and sugars, that it is called S.A.D.
It is possible that petrochemicals could interfere with the intricate synapses and engrams of the brain, even contributing to Dementia.
ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT CANCER AND THE OTHER CHRONIC DEGENERATIVE DISEASES.
WORK ON YOUR HEALTH EVERY DAY.
Get enough “SWARE” everyday as best as you can, but not overdoing it, build up with some of them and properly limit others…Sun, Water, Air, Rest, and Exercise.
And be sure to eat only Live Nature Made Food, free of chemicals, petrochemicals, or altered genes.
Aloha Pete thanks for your critique. You must know that doctors receive a mere 2 partial years studying the basic sciences of the human body and 2 more years studying which pill for which disease and the study of disease itself, but so little time, If any, studying Health and how to achieve and maintain it. Studying disease makes one an expert in disease, more and more, people are wanting to attended and taught about Health, the exact opposite of Disease.
Which do you prefer, and expert in Disease or an expert in Health. You only have so many years left, what do you want to devote your remaining time to…Disease? And it’s experts…? Hahaha you have been hoodwinked too. And as doctors end their 2nd 2 years of their 4 year medical degree…again devoted to disease, they then go into some more years of internship and residency practicing and learning more what drugs and surgeries are typically used for what disease signs and symptoms of the patients.
Basically they are digging deeper the rut of the Disease Care System, wherein year after decade the very Diseases they treat get worse and more people get those diseases; in other words their method is allowing the sickness of our nation become worse. With your Heroes 80% of Americans take medical drugs…Google that! Proof is in the statistics. Who do you blame? The ignorant patient or the well trained so called physicians promoting petrochemicals as an approach to masking disease, maintaining disease for the rest of ones life.
Diabetes, how long is the drug treatment for High blood pressure? How long is the treatment for? Cancer treatments, your hair falls out, you lose normal weight, your skin turns yellow or grey, and many die in the first few months of treatment.
Are you calling Health…quackery…? You’re too funny Pete. Thanks for your challenging comment, I like that challenge. Please make more challenging comments, but try to go into detail, it doesn’t read like you have much time invested in study but only the emotional response of a Believer…in the rut of Blind Faith.
And Pete would you call Mark Twain…Mr. Phoney Name? Sharing Health information with the community is a form of generosity of time and knowledge.
Mark Twain often wrote showing another side of an issue, an alternative, can you tell I copy his approach. For those that read through my comments, they receive some education from a source of much study and experience repeated in my comments. Many well respected medical doctors speak and write with similar information that you might be missing out on. It’s your health that’s important be sure you protect it with broad perspective so you don’t get pinched when the rut narrows. Sincerely, and Best to you.