Respecting People With Alzheimer’s

I admire someone like Charlene Folcarerelli (“Living with Alzheimer’s,” May 18) very much because she took her husband’s diagnosis as a challenge and continued to treat him as an individual. But even she has not been able to resist the implication that her husband had become a category rather than a person.

Mrs. Folcarerelli got her cue from Carl W. Cotman, director of UCI’s brain aging and Alzheimer’s research unit. He is quoted as saying, “We still don’t understand what it is that allows them to do that (italics mine).” I know it is far easier to say “they” or “them” when referring to persons who have been diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s, but such usage just makes it that much easier to regard such person as firmly fixed in a category rather than as being individuals with different capacities.

The practice of categorizing individuals medically is just as iniquitous as categorizing them racially or ethnically.

FORREST STRAYER,

Laguna Beach