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The Next Generation
The first year of medical school is not typically a time when students seek out extra commitments and challenges. Yet when University of Toledo Health Science Campus student Caleb Bupp, 24, received a flier about a dementia care elective, it caught his attention. With a grandfather in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and a strong family history of dementia, Caleb thought it would be prudent-both personally and, as a doctor in training, professionally-to check it out.
So Caleb wrote an essay to gain acceptance into the course, and then spent the better part of last year learning about Alzheimer's disease and its effect on families and the community. Today, Caleb says the experience deepened his understanding of the disease, and underscored the importance and urgency of finding a cure.
"There are so many diseases that when you learn about them in school, you learn about the disease and then, 'and this is what you do to fix it.' But when you learn about Alzheimer's, you learn about the disease and then there's nothing," he said. "And that's what draws me to Alzheimer's. For so many people, there's no hope. If there's going to be hope in the future, we have to do the legwork now."
For Caleb, that legwork started with the dementia care elective. The course, which is a collaboration between the medical school and the Alzheimer's Association Northwest Ohio Chapter, pairs students with individuals, called mentors, who are caregivers of someone with the disease. While lectures provided details about the pathology and progression of the disease, Caleb found the sessions devoted to caregiver stress, along with his lunchtime chats with his mentor to be the most informative and eye-opening aspect of the experience.
"As physicians, we're trained moderately well in how to handle Alzheimer's, but nothing is said about what the caregiver goes through," he said. "The health problems that come with being a caregiver are amazing, and that's something, as a physician, you need to be aware of."
Caleb's interest in Alzheimer research and clinical care eventually led him to the 2006 Alzheimer's Association Public Policy Forum in Washington, D.C. There, he found the sessions on Alzheimer research especially interesting.
"It was a neat experience to hear from top scientists," he said. "Everyone was very excited by people saying we're close to a cure, but I actually understood the theories they were talking about."
Finally, Caleb said the memory he's most likely to carry with him, and the one that most energized his advocacy efforts, was his interaction with attendees suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
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