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Patients with dementia frequently develop behavioral and psychiatric symptoms that are difficult to manage.

On admission to adult living facilities, they frequently are placed on psychotropics for behavior control.

Psychotropics can help on occasion but constrict the remaining personality and come with black box warnings.

Cannabis is showing increasing promise in helping control the disturbing symptoms dementia patients exhibit.

You pass them by all the time: some fancy, some more modest, buildings dotting cities, suburbs, and rural areas. They have names that evoke tranquility, luxury, or at least competent care. They are the thousands of assisted living facilities scattered around the country, particularly those with memory care units for residents with varying degrees of cognitive impairment.

Many people go by these places without much thought. Aside from the families, caregivers, and staff at these facilities, no one really knows, or thinks about, what is going on inside: the end-of-life dramas of people whose memories are eroding, no longer recognizing loved ones or themselves. Unless someone is acquainted with a person with dementia, they will have no idea about the painful scenarios that are playing out every day in these facilities and elsewhere.

Over the past six years, I’ve had the privilege of caring for patients with varying degrees of cognitive impairment. As a medical cannabis doctor, I often visit these patients in memory care units, seeing these once self-sufficient individuals, their personas now diminished, no longer able to care for themselves. They become angry and anxious as they confront the fact that their minds, their memories, what made them who they were, recollections of all that they have lived through and accomplished, are slipping away from........

© Psychology Today