It happens to everyone from time to time. You can’t quite put a name to someone’s face. You forget where you’ve put your keys. You can’t remember where you parked the car. Often such memory lapses happen because of tiredness, stress or because of a heavy schedule. But if your forgetfulness – or that of someone you know – is getting worse, if memory slips are becoming more frequent and persistent, if they are affecting your work or family life, or are beginning to interfere with everyday life, it can sometimes be the beginning of a specific medical problem such as dementia. Actually various things can affect memory, including getting older.
Even anxiety can make one forgetful. But if there is a medical reason for your forgetfulness, the earlier you get help the better.
There is help available for those with memory problems in Pune. Memory Clinic in Deenanath Hospital has been working since 2010. The clinic has been working with twin objectives of providing help to take quality care of the patients and to help caregivers and their family members deal with caregiving issues.
The Clinic’s activities are based on non-pharmacological model that is it uses non-medical ways of helping patients and their families.
Activities of the Clinic include
- Providing information about the nature of memory problems and underlying causes
- Guidance about how to handle memory problems by using memory tips and techniques
- Training in behaviour management of the patients
- Dealing with caregiver stress and burden
- Awareness development about memory problems
The clinic also runs a Support group for the caregiving families.
Another innovative programme of the Clinic is a memory lab where mentally challenging activities for the patients are conducted.
Memory Clinic has also prepared reading material in Marathi useful to the caregiving families.