Most doctors will tell you that no one has survived an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, but Florida is becoming ground zero for turning that contention on its head, or at least trying, for patients who have the money.
The Alzheimer’s Survivors Foundation was incorporated as a nonprofit entity in Florida in 2025 and its president, Judy Benjamin, 82, took a walk across the country — starting in San Diego April 5, 2025 and ending in St. Augustine on Nov. 15, 2025 — to spread the word to anyone willing to listen about her experience as “Patient Zero” of a California-based neurologist and best-selling author, Dr. Dale Bredesen.
After consulting with him at age 67, about 15 years ago, she credits his approach to Alzheimer’s with saving her from decline that consumed her mother. Her next walk starts Aug. 1, 2026, taking her across the United Kingdom — symbolic of how she’s come a long way since the day she scooped up one of her grandsons and called him by his older brother’s name.
“I have eliminated my symptoms of Alzheimer’s, so I don’t forget names, I don’t forget my phone number, I don’t get lost when I go out driving,” she said in a phone interview. “… I can do all the things that a normal person does, and I don’t forget things, and that’s the difference between what I am now and what I was.”
Bredesen’s prescription — a good deal of which is not covered by insurance — involves extensive testing and, depending on the results, a mix of supplements, lifestyle changes, environmental analysis, a quantitative electroencephalogram to measure brain waves, IV drips and maybe some time in a pressurized oxygen chamber.
One patient in a recent, nine-month clinical trial priced the care she received, including 60 sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, at $30,000. In a clinical trial, though, it was free to her.
“The opportunity to be a patient (in the trial) gave me back a confidence in my brain, my body and it truly removed my fear of what is in my family history,” said the 49-year-old whose father, grandmother and great-grandmother had the disease.
And the way it helped her, she says, she would buy it for herself if she could afford it.
Still, from the way Bredesen promotes his research, what he says he’s found would seem capable of altering the course of human events. The number of Americans diagnosed with dementia, the majority caused by Alzheimer’s, is expected to double from the 500,000 who heard the news in 2020 to 1 million in 2060, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“I want to show you that now we can really say that Alzheimer’s is finally optional,” Bredesen says in a 2023 video, echoing the title of his New York Times best-selling book, “The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline,” published in 2017.
Bredesen has some high-profile detractors, however.
In anticipation of a 2023 film featuring Bredesen and narrated by Grammy-winning singer Michael Bublé, the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada has gone so far as to say that Bredesen’s approach offers “false hope” as it requires patients to invest thousands of dollars in unproven treatments. Bredesen once did research the Alzheimer’s Association funded before the development of the protocol he calls ReCODE (Reversal of Cognitive Decline) but now the biggest nonprofit funder of Alzheimer’s research says it doesn’t recommend following Bredesen’s treatment protocol.
“This research is still in its early days,” said Maria C. Carrillo, Ph.D., Alzheimer’s Association chief medical officer and medical affairs lead. “… It should not be ‘sold’ as having a proven benefit.”
What are different types of Alzheimer’s research?
The Food and Drug Administration in 2023 approved a new class of drugs to slow Alzheimer’s destruction of the brain. That approach uses infused drugs to remove the plaques forming around the brain neurons that disrupt their communication.
It won FDA approval when clinical trials with a control group showed that those getting the medication had better results than those in the trial who didn’t.
Still, these drugs, which have a list price in the tens of thousands for a year of treatment, don’t promise to cure or reverse Alzheimer’s damage, it only slows the disease’s progress. It was not effective — or approved to be used — on patients in the advanced stages of the disease. Still, Medicare will cover the cost for eligible patients.
Bredesen’s talks, like a lot of online medical advice, tap into the frustration that mainstream medicine has been met with only limited success addressing chronic disease.
“When I was trained way back in the 1970s and 1980s in mainstream medicine, we (were taught to) write prescriptions … or send someone to surgery,” Bredesen said in a presentation available online. “That’s basically what you have to offer and that’s great for simple disease, like pneumococcal pneumonia.”
Mainstream medicine’s approach doesn’t address how the causes of chronic diseases are often a complex matter, Bredesen says.
“The Titanic, that is mainstream medicine, has rammed into the iceberg of chronic illness, and we’re all watching it sink into the frigid waters of failure and no amount of pharmaceutical duct tape is going to save it,” Bredesen says on one of his talks that runs almost two hours.
Meanwhile, adherents of Bredesen’s approach believe that Alzheimer’s is a sign the brain is under attack by dozens of underlying factors that must be addressed. Diet, exercise, hormone balancing, light therapy, targeted detoxification, among other interventions are on the list.
Some of that wisdom can be garnered through coaching without involving tens of thousands of dollars. And some of the tests the Bredesen protocol calls for are covered by insurance plans. Other aspects of the approach, however — such as the use of hyperbaric pressure chambers that are advertised at $315 for a 60- to 90-minute session — have yet to graduate from “experimental” to the level that insurance, Medicare in particular, would start considering some of its interventions as medically necessary and a covered cost.
Right now, getting treatment with increased oxygen pressure in a hyperbaric chamber qualifies for Medicare coverage if the patient is suffering from crush injuries, necrotizing infections or cyanide poisoning, along with 12 other conditions that don’t include Alzheimer’s or dementia.
How do insurance companies determined what treatments are covered?
A medical treatment transitions from experimental to covered once it accumulates robust clinical evidence, secures regulatory approval, and is endorsed by medical societies, according to information on the website of one of the country’s largest insurance companies, Cigna.
A preprint showing the results of a nine-month clinical trial, which had a test site in Hollywood, has raised hopes that Bredesen’s ideas could be on its way to mainstream acceptance. Seventy-three patients were randomly assigned to undergo the protocol or receive standard of care. And most of the patients in the protocol showed significant improvement in cognitive tests and brain wave activity imaging, according to the report, which awaits peer review and publication.
“Once the randomized clinical trial goes through peer review and gets formally published, hopefully this summer … my hope is that we’re able to accelerate adoption,” said Dr. Craig Tanio, who runs Rezilir Health in Hollywood, which is one of the test sites for the clinical trial now awaiting publication.
Tanio, board certified in internal medicine, has been putting Bredesen’s ideas into practice for 10 years, seven of them in a downtown Hollywood office where a sign “Hope” hangs in the waiting room.
His process involves analyzing not only the patient’s score on a cognitive test, but about 250 variables involving brain imaging, biochemical and microbiological testing and looking for 900 different gene variants.
Tanio’s experience, which has included running Medicare Advantage plans, convinced him that the practice of medicine has not been keeping up with the science, he said. About 500 patients are currently consulting with Rezilir, which also offers coaching in health, nutrition and exercise.
“Much of our medicine has been a single bullet … if you have a virus, you take an antiviral, he said. “… And what the biology is saying is, ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that.’”
Neurologists at Tampa General Hospital, where many drug trials for neurodegenerative diseases are conducted, say they’ve never heard of Bredesen or his protocols.
Dr. Michael Dobbs, chair of the Clinical Neurosciences Department at Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, said he’s familiar with Bredesen’s work and understands its appeal.
Neurologists, he said, “give patients and their families a lot of bad news in general, and Alzheimer’s is one of the one of the worst ones that we give, and we have to give it to a lot of people, because Alzheimer’s is so common these days.”
Bredesen recommends a lot of action items for families to take, and it’s not surprising that eating right and exercising, produces some improvement in Alzheimer’s patients, Dobbs said. But Dobbs said he’s still not convinced that it will reverse cognitive damage.
“This just doesn’t seem to be how the pathology and progression of the disease works,” he said.
Is unconventional Alzheimer’s treatment a trend or here to stay?
Undoubtedly, the lifestyle issues that Bredesen’s approach to Alzheimer’s addresses have been getting more respect in recent years.
The Alzheimer’s Association U.S. Study to Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk (known as U.S. POINTER study) was hailed at its presentation at the 2025 Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease as the first to find that a structured lifestyle program could reduce the risk for Alzheimer’s. The two-year clinical trial involving 2,100 participants found that there was reduce risk for Alzheimer’s among those who followed the study’s structured lifestyle programs that focused on improving sleep, better controlling blood pressure, and engaging in brain challenges and social activities.
Eleven Florida physicians can be found on the platform of Apollo Health, for which Bredesen is the chief scientific officer, as “trained” in Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol. Among the total of 36 Florida health practitioners certified, there are chiropractors, dietitians, nurse practitioners, dental hygienists, health coaches, physician assistants, and dentists.
Some of the practitioners add their own perspective to the list of treatments. Dr. Josh Helman, whose training includes Harvard Medical School, also recommends transfer plasma exchange for some of his patients — and himself. He is board-certified in emergency medicine.
“By doing this today, I’m decreasing my toxin level, which in turn will decrease my biologic age and remove any autoantibodies or lower the concentration of auto antibodies, too,” he says in a Facebook reel over the sound of whirring. “So, (it’s) an exciting time. And when I say toxins, I mean things like heavy metals, plastics, pesticides, forever chemicals, all those bad things.”
Bredesen’s recommendations don’t specifically include the plasma exchange.
“I view the Bredesen protocol as a starting point,” Helman said, who is also on staff at the Hippocrates Institute in West Palm Beach, where a three-week stay has a base price of $11,889. “I have been in this field for 10 years. TPE, TB006 (a monoclonal antibody treatment designed to fight pathogens), and many other of my treatments are not part of Bredesen protocol.”
Medicare covers the plasma treatment for several conditions, but neurodegenerative diseases are not among them.
Out-of-pocket, the treatment can cost up to $10,000, according to a Naples business offering it. A wellness franchise, which has a Miami location, is offering a package of sessions for $24,000, cut from the regular price of $30,000.
Helman said he does consultations with people all over the world and offers free advice on his podcasts — in answer to a crying need.
“Yes, people are definitely spending a lot of money on this, but also people can take specific actions that don’t cost any money,” says Helman, who charges his patients $600 for a session.
Dr. Maria Gutierrez Horn, also Bredesen-certified in her Jupiter practice called Beyond Hormones, said converting to this model of practice after 24 years as a board-certified endocrinologist, is allowing her to spend more time with her patients than the average seven-minute consultation she customarily had with each of them in her traditional practice.
In 2025, she became fully certified in what’s called “functional medicine.”
“It’s more about what is it in a body that we need to remove?” Horn said. “That could be food, that could be pathogens, that could be trauma, that could be toxins.”
She recalled when she would see pre-diabetic patients and tell them to come back when they were sicker and needed insulin.
“We were never taught in medical school to really bring somebody back to health,” she said.
Anne Geggis is statewide reporter for the USA TODAY NETWORK FLORIDA, reporting on health and senior issues. If you have news tips, please send them to ageggis@usatodayco.com. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at https://palmbeachpost.com/newsletters.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Can money buy you Alzheimer’s protection? They’re trying in Florida
Reporting by Anne Geggis, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Sarasota Herald-Tribune
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Anne Geggis, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida | USA TODAY Network
