Managing persons with dementia in the nursing home: high touch trumps high tech.

摘要

American medicine is driven by the desire to provide newer and ever more expensive medicines, which too often provide small advances or even retrogressive outcomes. Over the past decade the enthusiasm to use drugs to treat the cognitive and the behavioral symptoms of dementia has grown.1"4 At the same time, numerous studies have suggested that excellent outcomes can be obtained with aggressive psychosocial programs. ~7 Unfortunately, while the uptake of medication use has been large, the universal introduction of psychosocial interventions has been inconsistent at best. This editorial will attempt to make the case that drugs (both cognitive enhancers and behavioral modifiers) are overused and that they should be replaced by psychosocial interventions.