The affect was specifically noted in socio economically deprived families. (Quote: Paediatrics Vol. No. 101 1998, Children Who Prosper in Unfavourable Environments, The Relationship to Social Capital).

Another study has found that dementia occurs at a much higher rate amongst elderly people with learning disabilities than it does amongst the general population This is independent of the association between Dementia and Downs Syndrome. (Quote: High Prevalence of Dementia amongst People with Learning Disabilities not Attributable to Downs Syndrome, Sally Ann Cooper, Psychological Medicine 1997, No. 27.) A further study examines the perception of parental caring obtained from under-graduates, relating to subsequent health over an ensuing 35 years. This was done on Harvard under-graduate men who participated in the Harvard Mastery of Stress Study, and the results showed that subjects identified in mid-life as suffering from the common degenerative diseases of western society gave their parents significantly lower ratings as perceived in terms of parental care, loving and just, and fair and hardworking and clever whilst in college.

It is obvious that intellectual stimulation and loving, caring, support from parents, family, community, and society at large, is extremely important for the general wellbeing of the individual as well as for the prevention of intellectual deficit in later life. It also shows that there is more to the development of intellectual retardation in aging, than purely biological processes.

Family feelings, social economic forces, work status, ethnic identity and individual biological differences all come together in each of us. The whole is more than the sum of these vital parts. The new medicine takes into account these differences and realises that the biomedical model is authoritarian and takes responsibility out of the patients hands. It also presupposes that we can all be made into statistics for the benefit of double blind medical trials or evidence based medicine. This does not acknowledge the individuality of the patient and the fact that there is idiosyncrasy and difference in every person.

As Professor Roger Williams has pointed out, there are significant differences in normal peoples sensitivity to a rate of metabolism of pharmaceutical agents. Not only that, we fail to acknowledge the effect of social and economic forces on health and illness and even on peoples ability to think and cognite correctly depending upon their level of stress and their life state at a particular time. As Dr. Candace Pert has shown, the whole body is a brain and the neuropeptides existing in the cell walls of the immune system also found in the cell walls of the brain. The glial tissue of the brain has enormous immune properties. Similarly, the lymphoid tissue around the intestines contains the same neuropeptides, 60% of the immune system of the body is found around the intestines. The gut could be said to be a second brain.