Is It Dementia, Alzheimer’s or Medication Side Effects? With Germaine Odenheimer MD — A geriatric neurologist opines on public misinformation

These days there are too many people on social media proclaiming Trump has dementia when she says that all the facts are not available. Dr. Odenheimer is a geriatric neurologist and professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. She retired from academic medicine in 2017, keeps her medical license, and advocates for people with dementia and their caregivers. Dr. Odenheimer and I are colleagues in the Program in Psychiatry and the Law, a forensic think associated with Harvard Medical School. Like myself, she values truth telling and integrity. This commitment can get us both in conflict with others in our respective fields.She also cared for her own mother, who had dementia. We first spoke in 2022 about her fight against a false Alzheimer’s cure, in our earlier conversation⁵. This time we talked about the dementia misdiagnosis problems she has seen across her career. In this interview, we didn’t focus on Donald Trump. However, I thought it important to ask a forensic expert on dementia to come on my podcast again. This topic demands an expert knowing all the facts and doing her due diligence before tracking down a correct diagnosis. There are huge numbers of aging people who are being misdiagnosed and supplements and quack claims of treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia abound. Dementia misdiagnosis changes what happens to a person next: the medications they take, the independence they keep, and the care their family chooses.