ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the politics surrounding the emergence of Alzheimer's disease as the currently most publicized health problem in old age. Catastrophic projections of the burden to society of an increasing aging population abound. The prevailing belief is that an increasing aging population means increasing demands on the resources of society, including health care resources, in the face of competing interests and diminishing, or at best finite, resources. The view that the “problem” of aging is primarily one of physiological decline medicalizes old age; that is, the phenomenon and experience of aging is brought within the medical paradigm as individual pathology to be treated and cured. In Armstrong's formulation, this represents a shift in thinking from the nineteenth century notion of disease as localized in specific sites in the body to the twentieth century notion of disease as localized in the social spaces between people.
