Cultural failure to recognize tacit knowledge explains why credential-based knowledge has higher status and prioritizes clinicians who do not care on an hour-to-hour basis for most of our country’s elders.

The separation of dental and medical care is a medical ethics issue because it negatively impacts vulnerable populations who lack access to dental care.

Authentic partnerships with people with dementia motivate full social participation and resist fatalism around experiences of illness.

Arts participation can counterbalance the social stigma of Alzheimer’s disease by fostering the autonomy and creativity of those with the diagnosis.

Patients with dementia need social supports and opportunities and acceptance of their disability in order to feel hopeful despite their functional decline.

Physicians have an obligation to consider a patient’s quality of life when making treatment decisions and should consider giving patients the options of withholding or withdrawing aggressive treatment if that treatment will not restore the kind of life the patient finds meaningful.

Physicians and surrogates should take patients' preferences into account in making clinical intervention decisions, even if the patients have been found to lack decision-making capacity.

Physicians and surrogates should take patients' preferences into account in making clinical intervention decisions, even if the patients have been found to lack decision-making capacity.

Physicians and surrogates should take patients' preferences into account in making clinical intervention decisions, even if the patients have been found to lack decision-making capacity.