Attleboro Author and Wall Street Journal Reporter Team Up to Create Alzheimer's Documentary

Local author Brad Pitman is not afraid to ask tough questions, especially when it involves Alzheimer's Disease. The Attleboro author of a memoir about how Pitman cared for his ailing mother, has teamed up with Joseph Pereira, a former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, to create a documentary. 

Pitman and Pereira shared their own personal stories on how Alzheimer's affected their lives with a crowd at the Tuesday night. Along with sharing their knowledge, their goal was to find participants willing to share their story for the documentary. 

Unlike films that document a patient's deterioration from the disease, the documentary will offer viewers a positive outlook on how basic changes like diet and exercise help patients. The documentary will chronicle the lives of people diagnosed or led to believe by their physicians that they have Alzheimer's. It will also question existing methods of treating Alzheimer's including the several medications on the market that are currently given to patients diagnosed with the disease. 

Pereira explained that most of the drugs to treat Alzheimer's that are available today are based on research and clinical trials done in the 1970s. 

"Basically the drugs some of you or your loved ones are taking are really outdated," Pereira said.  

Pereira's own father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the early 1990s and was prescribed Aricept, he said. 

"I said this stuff is junk for you," Pereira told the audience recalling a conversation with his father. "I’m going to try to talk to your doctors about this."

Pereira's father went off the drug and went from someone who use to sit on the couch staring blankly at the TV in a catatonic and stuper state to a different person. 

"He made a dramatic recovery," Pereira said. In 2001, he visited his father and had a conversation with him for seven hours.

"He was witty, finding fault with my logic," he said. "I was so amazed with this 77- year-old man, who was an aeronautical engineer, that I told him he should go back to work."

Pitman was careful to not provide medical advice to the audience, but shared his own experience of what helped his mother.