Holistic Doctors, and medicine

Molbiogirl asked me to come here. She said, "Nator and I did quite a number on 'naturopathy'" here. I'm not so sure I agree with that. Purpledawn and Buzsaw seem to know their stuff too.Molbiogirl, you make much use here of the Quackwatch site. There's nothing like cherrypicking your links to find one that says what you want. If it's against any kind of alternative medicine, you can guarantee that Stephen Barrett will have an article about it. You quote from the "authority" of his site as if that speaks for itself. It does not.For all the insistence here on transparency, accreditation, and so on, I would ask you what you make of this information. Barrett has made a lot of money from the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, and has close ties to them still. Also he was de-licensed in the 1990s, and is not a Medical Board Certified psychiatrist because he failed the certification exam. He has also been forced to concede in a court case that he has ties to the AMA, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Food & Drug Administration (FDA). These are all organisations with an interest in promoting allopathic (mainstream Western) medicine -- a gravy train which makes them a lot of money -- over alternative medicine, which promotes things like vitamins and herbs that don't have a patent. Finally, he claims to be a "legal expert" and has testified as an expert witness in a number of cases. In fact, he has no legal training whatsoever.People here have said that the pharmaceutical industry has an interest in selling its drugs. There is no reason whatsoever for it to test something like a vitamin, because it can't patent a vitamin. The FDA is no longer the watchdog it was created to be; many of the people in the highest echelons there have ties to the pharmaceutical industry, or go on to have careers there once they leave the FDA. It is the government's rubber stamp for fast-tracking drugs.Are you not familiar with the recent scandals involving "blockbuster" drugs such as Vioxx, Avandia, Accutane, Ketek and Zyprexa? Or do the thousands of deaths these drugs have caused not matter, because the patients should have been aware of the side effects? Well evidence has emerged recently, from a court case, that Eli Lilly were aware of the increased incidences of type II diabetes in users of Zyprexa. But they conveniently did not publish this particular aspect of their test results, and currently there is no law requiring them to do so. Clinical trials are overwhelmingly run by the companies that make the drug being tested, and they are under no obligation to come clean about the full results. Standard practice is to only publish the results that show a significant efficacy against placebo. Is this the rigorous scientific testing that has been referred to here? Try Googling a few sites other than Quackwatch and you might discover a thing or two.According to Wikipedia, there were 225,000 deaths in the US in the year 2000 that were due to iatrogenic (doctor-related) causes. This constitutes the third leading cause of death, after deaths from heart disease and cancer. Of these, it estimates 106,000 to be non-error, negative effects of drugs. Iatrogenesis - Wikipedia
Why are people trying to harp on a few cases of possible toxicity of herbs when this is going on? What does that say about the belief systems from which people are operating here?Moving on from this . . . Nator, can I ask you what Linus Pauling's "wacky ideas" about vitamin C were? See if you can find something about this that isn't on Quackwatch. Also make sure that any clinical studies that were done, actually used the correct amounts of vitamin C that Pauling recommended. He used up to 100 GRAMS per day safely with some very ill cancer patients; they received it intravenously. He recommended that healthy people take 3 to 10 grams a day, in divided doses. Many studies that have claimed to attempt to duplicate his own, have used less than a gram, and then these results get trumpeted in the media as showing that Linus Pauling was "wrong" about vitamin C.If anyone would like a more balanced view of naturopathic medicine that includes good nutrition, then I suggest you have a look at http://www.mercola.com/index.htmAs for myself, I work online with a naturopathic doctor who is also an MD. She runs a non-profit list that helps people like me, who have had lingering ill effects from medications. At the top of her list is the Paleolithic Diet, which largely reflects the dietary list that Buzsaw posted at the beginning of this thread. Next come dietary supplements tailored to the individual's needs. I take a high-quality multivitamin, vitamin C (9 grams a day), a colloidal mineral supplement (and don't try to tell me what Stephen Barrett says about this, I know it well, and he doesn't know what he's talking about), magnesium, calcium, vitamin E, selenium, and fish oil. Also, because I have cortisol dysfunction caused by the medication I was on, this is helped by taking the herbs ginkgo biloba and ashwagandha, sometimes relora if it's a big problem, and Bach Cherry Plum flower essence. I know they work because when my cortisol is high, my heart races and I feel jittery. These things calm it all down. I don't imagine it, it's a real effect. And my anecdotal info here is true, so it's up to you whether you want to wave it away or not because I haven't been tested in a lab. An openness to some of these things could help you with your health, but that of course is your decision Finally, Rat, if sinuses are a problem, I suggest you try learning neti. Get a neti pot. All you need is water and salt, and you can add some good-quality colloidal silver too if you think you have an infection. It's a lot cheaper than buying herbs, and since I started doing it, it has warded off a number of colds. Yes, all you have is my word for it here for what it's worth, though if you Google "neti" you will see how it helps your sinuses to stay healthy. I would also recommend vitamin C to boost your immune system. At least 3 grams per day, in divided doses, same as Linus Pauling recommended. It is harmless and it might help.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Hi Rat. Glad the neti is helping. Yes you can use salt, though you need to make sure no anti-caking agents have been added. Sea salt is usually good. My naturopath suggested adding the colloidal silver and I've had consistently good results with it. Also, dairy and sugar can inflame sinuses; you could try avoiding both, if you don't already. Sugar also depresses the immune system. Hope you're feeling better soon

I did. And the drug that my doctor gave me was subject to all these processes. Yes, let's put our faith in the clinical trials that say this drug is largely effective and harmless. My doctor certainly thought so. He wasn't the only doctor to think this either. That drug ended up nearly destroying my life. It is a year and a half since I stopped taking it and I am still experiencing many of the symptoms I had initially upon discontinuation, though with the help of my ND and her diet and supplement regime, they are gradually lessening. My ND works with thousands of others who took my drug or a similar one, and who have experienced symptoms similar to mine. They go to her to help fix the damage that allopathic medicine wrought on them. I could share some horror stories about what these people have been through. My own GP doesn't believe me when I tell him about my symptoms because "this cannot be." Unfortunately it often takes an experience like mine in order to have one's eyes opened. Before that, I was like you Percy -- went to my doc, got medicine when I was ill, never saw any reason to question the trust I placed in the "tried-and-tested" mainstream medical system.I will reply in more detail to Nator's and Molbiogirl's posts to me a little later. I've spent a lot of time checking their links and looking up my own. My ND, however, asked me why I am actually doing this. She considers it to be a waste of energy, when I could be giving this info to people who are actually open to it and want to use it. I see no evidence here that the skeptics have any interest in actually educating themselves about the topics at hand. There is much mouse-clicking and link-making but it's obvious to me that the links are often not thoroughly investigated. Also, I have a book by Linus Pauling called How to Live Longer and Feel Better. I'm finding it a little irritating that I can give info straight from this source but am dealing with people who want to dismiss him out of hand using links from a second party like Stephen Barrett. If you want to let Mr. Barrett do your thinking for you that is your choice, but don't consider yourself to be getting an unbiased or accurate picture of anything from him. If it reassures you that his brand of science and medicine are correct and chime nicely with your views, then indeed it's probably a waste of energy for me to try to convince anyone otherwise. I was never under any illusions that that might be the case here anyway. What are we actually doing by discussing this, just trying to score points off each other?The whole philosophy behind Quackwatch and its sources is wrong, from a naturopathic point of view. I asked if anyone knows how allopathic medicine cures anything, apart from with antibiotics. Yes docs can fix a broken leg or do an organ transplant. I have no problem with seeing them for that. However, I have no interest in using medications to alleviate symptoms when I can instead get at the root causes of those symptoms, which is often achieved by knowledgeable use of diet and supplements.Naturopathy believes that the body can usually heal itself, given the right materials. A poor environment, toxins outside and inside the body, and poor nutrition can all be catalysts for disease. Allopathic medicine overwhelmingly treats the symptoms rather than their causes. Case in point, various kinds of mental illness. Usually you get a drug for these from your doc. No one should be pretending that these drugs actually cure anything. Naturopathy sees mental illness as a symptom of an underlying problem. I have first-hand experience of seeing quite a number of people come off psychotropic drugs, and stay off them for years, using naturopathic methods. Sometimes their own docs had them drugged up on 10 or more meds at a time initially. That was their idea of "treatment."It is up to you whether you'd like to learn more about this, or whether you dismiss it as meaningless anecdotal evidence. I sincerely hope that you or your loved ones will not have to suffer severe illness before you consider other possibilities outside of conventional medicine. Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

His expertise is questionable. At the moment he seems to be on a crusade to sue his detractors for defamation. Within the past few years he has filed such lawsuits against 40 people across the country and has not won any of them at trial.He lost a court case against a homeopathic manufacturer in the California Superior Court in 2001. In this case, Judge Haley Fromholz seriously called Barrett's qualifications into question when he appeared as an "expert witness." Here is an excerpt from the judge's statement: "As for his credential as an expert on FDA regulation of homeopathic drugs, the Court finds that Dr. Barrett lacks sufficient qualifications in this area. Expertise in FDA regulation suggests a knowledge of how the agency enforces federal statutes and the agency's own regulations. Dr. Barrett's purported legal and regulatory knowledge is not apparent. He is not a lawyer, although he claims he attended several semesters of correspondence law school. While Dr. Barrett appears to have had several past conversations with FDA representatives, these appear to have been sporadic, mainly at his own instigation, and principally for the purpose of gathering information for his various articles and Internet web-sites. He has never testified before any governmental panel or agency on issues relating to FDA regulation of drugs. Presumably his professional continuing education experiences are outdated given that he has not had a current medical licence in over seven years. For these reasons, there is no sound basis on which to consider Dr. Barrett qualified as an expert on the issues he was offered to address. Moreover, there was no real focus to his testimony with respect to any of the issues in this case associated with Defendants' products."He also brought to court a health care practitioner from Missouri who used chelation therapy on his heart patients. His patients got better, but Barrett attempted to have his license to practice medicine taken away from him. This case went to the Missouri Supreme Court, and Barrett lost. This is what one of the judges said: "One could argue that because chelation therapy is not accepted by mainstream medicine and is an off-label practice not approved by the FDA, it is therefore harmful and dangerous. If that were the board's position, the licensing statute would thwart advances in medical science. A dramatic example is the treatment of stomach ulcers, which were long thought to be caused by stress. In 1982, two Australians found the bacterium helicobacter pylori in the stomach linings of ulcer victims. Because helicobacter pylori is a bacterium, some physicians -- a minority to be sure -- began prescribing antibiotics to treat stomach ulcers as an infectious disease. The National Institutes of Health did not recognize antibiotic therapy until 1994; the FDA approved the first antibiotic for use in treating stomach ulcers in 1996; and the Centers for Disease Control began publicizing the treatment in 1997. Today’s physicians accept as fact that most stomach ulcers are primarily caused by helicobacter pylori bacteria infection and not by stress. (FN6) But, by the chronology of this discovery, if a physician in the late 1980s or early 1990s had treated ulcers with antibiotics, that treatment would have been 'negligent' as the board in this case interprets that term because inappropriate use of antibiotics can be dangerous."Little progress would be made if people weren't willing to think outside the box. Sometimes that might mean personally being willing to use a treatment that hasn't undergone the "rigorous scientific testing" of FDA-approved drugs, with the hope that in the near future these tests will take place as the popularity of the treatment increases and mainstream medicine begins to realise how useful it is. If you are a skeptic them presumably you will wait for that day. I personally see no reason to, if there are other kinds of evidence that the treatment is sound. I know that I will not come to any harm by using things that are natural to the body such as nutritious food, good-quality vitamins, and fish oil. You have to be more careful with herbs as they are not native to the body and are used more medicinally, though when used with the proper expertise they can be very beneficial.You said: I assume this is a generalisation. How were these millions of lives saved? Modern medicine knows some amazing things about putting people back together when they are injured. It can perform some amazing feats of surgery. And yes, sometimes drugs can save lives. But how many drugs have actually CURED anyone? This is what naturopathic medicine aims to do: cure, not treat the symptoms.Back to Stephen Barrett. Yes, one of my sources (Bolen) was wrong. Barret allowed his license to lapse; he was not de-licensed. He still failed the certification exam that he took, and he knows little about the things he is criticising on his website. I will talk about vitamin C in more detail further on. It depends on what substance you are looking at. Various concoctions might pose some danger to people. I don't buy these. My ND reads the medical literature and researches each product that she recommends, and I often go with what she says, though I also know that if you are taking things which are native to the body they pose little to no risk. A few vitamins, like our vitamin A here, have a toxicity threshold, but most of them don't seem to, and have been safely given in megadoses by physicians.In "Vitamin Deaths: Where are the Bodies?", Andrew Saul at http://www.doctoryourself.com/vitsafety.html writes, "Over a 23-year period, vitamins have been connected with the deaths of a total of TEN people in the US. Poison control statistics confirm that more Americans die each year from eating soap than from taking vitamins . . . In 16 of those 23 years, AAPCC reports that there was not one single death due to vitamins."Let's take vitamin C then. This is what I was referring to in my previous post. Presumably you read my request to Nator not to cite any studies that used less than the megadoses of vitamin C that Linus Pauling used. Yet the links you both have given me did just that. All I ask is that you look thoroughly into what you are linking to, because I then had to do the work myself to get the info that shows that this study actually proves nothing about vitamin C. You can see for yourself here http://findarticles.com/..._m0841/is_n3_v28/ai_14071547/pg_1 that this study did not use megadoses at all. There were 3 subgroups and Enstrom estimates that their daily vitamin C intake was 30mg, 150mg, and 300mg respectively. The first group will develop scurvy if they haven't done already. The next two groups will fall under Pauling's definition of subclinical scurvy. Whatever this study claims to show about vitamin C is meaningless. Pauling used many GRAMS and his studies are there for people to research if they care to do so; but as I said, one after the other uses much less of the vitmain than Pauling's studies used. Why this is, by ignorance or design, one can perhaps only speculate.Furthermore, regarding the link to this abstract you gave me. People often cite studies based only on titles or abstracts. And they are easy for click-and-linkers to spot and use. If you read the entire article you will often find that the title and conclusion are not supported by the data. An abstract and conclusion are allowed to be merely a statement from the authors. They need not be accurate. Something to bear in mind maybe.Finaly, you said: Yes, I do know, though I don't like the term "panic disorder." And indeed, adrenal overload is part of a panic attack. I am in no doubt myself that this is not the problem with me, but if you want my explanation I'll give it. I never had any problems of this kind until after I stopped my drug. You have probably guessed that it was an antidepressant. Many people are prescribed these drugs now and I don't fear any stigma here from talking about it. When I ceased the drug, these problems developed, among others. They flare up when my nervous system is overstimulated from things like: loud noises, crowds, too much TV, too much computer (LOL), arguing with people (again LOL -- this conversation is becoming hazardous to my health), reading a book for too long a period, exercising at more than a walk (I used to do a heavy workout at the gym before the drug with no trouble), and unfortunately a full work day. A year ago I got a job where I worked 4 full days a week and it made me very ill; I had to quit. I am once again trying to ease back in but I start feeling sick after lunch, I'm exhausted and jittery when I get home, and I wake in the middle of the night with my heart racing and have trouble getting back to sleep. This eases when I rest for a few days. In the meantime the relora helps a lot, and so does the Bach Cherry Plum. It's actually best to avoid the overstimulation in the first place, but that can't always happen. This is what I was telling me GP about when he shook his head and said he'd never heard of it happening. My ND is very familiar with it as an effect of these drugs, however, and she knows how to treat it, though it can take a long time to heal. It's damage to the adrenals and the CNS. My GP listens to the companies that make these drugs. He has little interest in the side effects they produce. He was never interested in monitoring me on the drug, and never heard about what I went through in discontinuing it until I mentioned it a year later when I was seeing him for something else. I suspect many others get similar adrenal problems to me but the problems go away fairly quickly, or they don't recognise them for what they are, or they do what i did and say to hell with the ignorant GP, I'm going to find someone who really can help me.

Nator you said: OK we're talking about a whole website. I've spent long, exhausting hours for what amounts to probably no sane reason, doing research for the conversations I am having here. My own areas of knowledge lie mainly in vitamins, nutrition, and psychotropic medications. Would you like to pick one of those areas on his website and ask me about it? If I'm going to do more research I would prefer to narrow the topic. Referring to what I said to Molbiogirl above, while I enjoy talking on internet forums, I've been putting in too many computer hours and it is raising my cortisol. It's unpleasant and perhaps a stupid thing for me to do, but I was keen to talk somewhere on this forum.You said: If therein lies the whole truth, then I would not be developing cortisol jitters at the computer, I'd be able to exercise at the gym again, and I wouldn't have any trouble going out to work. I know other people who have suffered far worse from these drugs. Tardive dyskinesia. Neuralgia so severe in the feet that walking is impossible. Suicidal and homicidal ideation. I know 2 people who successfully sued Glaxo for the damage that their drug Paxil did to them. There have been other court cases about these kinds of meds, in the past and the present. Lilly has had a lot of trouble regarding Prozac and suicide and they've had to pay out a lot of money. Also, if you look into the details about school shootings in the US in the past few decades, you will find that most of the perpetrators were on some kind of psychotropic drug. You could of course say that they were mentally ill to begin with, which is why they were on the drugs, and the mental illness might have caused them to become homicidal. I would say look more deeply. Guns have been readily available to Americans for hundreds of years, yet it is only in recent years that these shootings have taken place. They mirror the upward trend in prescriptions of psychotropic drugs. I am also aware of the specific details in some of these cases, which strongly suggest that it was the drugs that caused the youngsters to become homicidal. This is not the place to go into it further, but my point is that these are drugs which have received FDA approval, about which you can find many of those "professional scientific papers," and which Barrett would recommend you take, rather than trying the "woo-woo naturopathic" approach. Scientific papers have their place; but if you gave me the ones about any psychotropic drug, I would use them as toilet paper. My naturopath. She has been tracking Barrett for years. I'm quite aware that this doesn't stand up as evidence for anyone here, but I haven't been able to find any links yet that give these kinds of details about him. I will ask my ND; but in the meantime, I will simply ask this: Where does a retired psychiatrist get the money to fund all those lawsuits and legal bills? In the court case Barrett vs. Koren (2005), under cross-examination by trial lawyer Carlos Negrete, Barrett admitted that he failed the certification exam. And your source of evidence is Barrett's own CV from his website??But yes, I agree that it probably makes no difference what I say about Barrett here. I'm happy to discuss an aspect of his website with you, as I mentioned above, though the level of detail and research I'm willing to engage in will probably reflect the interest here, which seems to be zero for any form of alternative medicine, and plenty for debate for its own sake. Of course I don't seriously believe in this strawman. However, there is plenty of evidence that pharmaceuticals cover up studies and trials that show their drugs in a negative light. If they were genuinely interested in the health of the people taking those drugs then why don't they come clean without being forced to do so in court? And why do they spend billions of dollars on marketing their drugs on the TV? They want you to think you've got a disease and go to your doctor and ask for that drug. Again, surely this isn't in the best interests of the patients. Their representatives market to GPs directly all the time, and give them gifts and take them out for meals, to try to ensure the numbers of prescriptions for their drugs go up. Most of the information that doctors have about drugs comes from the pharmaceutical companies. Most mainstream doctors do not have an interest in taking anything other than a drug-centered approach to treatment, no matter whether it is actually the most suitable treatment, because of the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. They have a hand in GP's careers right from the beginning; they are heavily involved in training in medical schools, as I believe Purple said here. You might think this is OK if drugs really are the answer for so many ills but they don't HAVE TO BE. Like I said, how many things do they actually cure?On the other hand, I'm well aware that vitamins and herbs are marketed and sold. Occasionally the manufacturers of a pseudo-product prey on people's gullibility and I agree that these practices need to be exposed. But there are also a lot of high-quality supplements out there that help people. They are not marketed in the way that pharmaceuticals are; GPs don't have reps from vitamin companies knocking on their doors and asking them out to a steak and lobster lunch, or a "conference" in Hawaii. In fact, US law makes it difficult for manufacturers of supplements to be able to give information about why they believe their products to be helpful, as you can read here: http://www.newstarget.com/z019314.htmlOne other point to add here is that when I mention vitamins, I add the caveat "high quality." There are certainly some ripoff merchants who don't care what you're ingesting in their little capsules. That's why you've got to read labels and study what it is you're wanting to buy. Some vitamins contain unhealthy ingredients like hydrogenated vegetable oil and hydrolyzed protein. Some contain raw soy. Some are synthetic versions of the vitamins, rather than natural versions, and often the synthetic versions are ineffective or harmful (for example vitamin D2 and dl-alpha-tocopherol, vitamin E). Some, especially cheap store-bought vitamins, have low bioavailability. You simply have to do your research to know what the best products are to buy, but this holds true for any consumer product.You go on to talk about statistics of the side effects of pharmaceuticals and herbs. As I said to Molbiogirl, my ND heads her list with diet and things that are natural to the body like vitamins and fish oil. These alone can produce healing in many cases and there are no side effects or deaths involved. Herbs would be a little further down the list because they tend to be a medicinal substance that the body does not recognise as being native to it. I trust my ND's advice about these and do not take any without her recommendation, or thorough research of my own. I'm not against statistics of users of herbs being monitored, as long as that does not mean restricting people's right to sell or use genuine ones. You did not answer my question, however, of why people here are so focused on things like deaths from herbs. I take it the deaths from pharmaceuticals are OK are they, just par for the course? Let's hope you yourself never have to make a decision about whether or not to take a drug that could seriously harm your health. If you work on the sorts of methods of prevention that Buzsaw outlined, this may never have to be the case. I mentioned Dr. mercola here for starters but you had a good laugh about that. How long were you there, 30 seconds? I recommend any books by Linus Pauling. I recommend Peter Breggin as an alternative for people who advocate psychotropic drugs. Breggin.com | Home I recommend anything by Dr. Abram Hoffer, who has been practicing for years and who is known for treating schizophrenia with niacin and vitamin C. He is the editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which you can find here, Page not found – OrthoMed.org and a site with more general orthomolecular information is here Welcome To Orthomolecular.org This is a good one for news on drugs and big pharma Page not found – Alliance for Human Research Protection And this is a good book on using naturopathy and environmental medicine to treat depression, though the methods in it could be applied to any number of ailments: Depression Cured at Last by Sherry A. Rogers, MD.The orthomolecular sites probably come closest to meeting your definition of science-based (unless you want to read a book), in that they contain some specialised information on studies. I don't tend to read scientific papers, I am not a scientist, but my ND is knowledgeable about them and occasionally she posts papers on her list. I'm not sure what else you want from me. I could give more links but I doubt if you'd be interested in them. I'm comfortable with what I know and what I do and I don't personally feel that the only proof for any of it lies in scientific papers. If you were genuinely interested in educating yourself about naturopathy, as opposed to taking Barrett's word as law, then you have the intelligence to do this.You said, regarding vitamin C and the common cold and cancer: As I've said in my post to Molbiogirl, people aren't using the amounts that Pauling used. He also was not aware of the key role that diet plays in health and healing; he recommended a fairly good dietary regime, but it wouldn't have had the health benefits of something like the Paleolithic Diet. Even so, the links you gave from Barrett's site only show again that neither he nor you really know much about Pauling or what he did, and it helps to know about a subject before you criticise it.Link #1: Ascorbic acid for the common cold. None of the methods employed would prevent a cold, though they might go some way toward reducing the frequency of colds. And once you have a cold, 3g daily doesn't cut it.Once you get a cold, and you intend to use vitamin C to head it off, you need to start taking it to bowel tolerance as soon as you feel the first tickle in your throat, or any other symptom. It's important to do this as early as possible. Bowel tolerance means that you have a loose stool. You take whatever dose is required hourly to reach this, and then drop your dosage just a lttle below it once you've had the loose stool. Continue to do this for two or three days, then drop the dosage gradually. You could find that you are taking two or more grams per hour. Pauling recommended this. My ND recommends this. I've tried it and it's worked for me. It's a bit of a pain having to take something on the hour though, and I prefer putting colloidal silver in my neti pot to head off a cold instead because that works too.Link #2: vitamin C and advanced cancer. Firstly, it has to be said that if cancer is advanced, which was the basis of this study, then even vitamin C is likely not going to be a big help. You need to use treatments like this before the person is knocking at death's door -- and why wouldn't you, if the alternative was chemotherapy? Pauling did a lot of work in this area and he wrote a book about it.Secondly, the patients received 10g of vitamin C a day. This abstract implies that the vitamin was given orally, as it says one group received a "comparably flavoured lactose placebo." Again, this study was doomed from the start. 10g of vitamin C a day is what Pauling recommended for HEALTHY people. I myself take 9. Pauling gave over 100g per day to cancer patients, and it was given intravenously, in which form it is much more efficiently absorbed. Why didn't the people who set this study up know this? It's a waste of money and people's time, the patients didn't get better, and Barrett can trumpet that Pauling was wrong about vitamin C.Link #3: The abstract doesn't even say how much vitamin C was given. I don't think it's too unrealistic to assume that vitamin C was not given to bowel tolerance to stop the cold, or even that a proper megadose was given. Until you can give me the specifics, I can't count this as evidence for anything.For goodness sake, just read How to Live Longer and Feel Better and find out what Pauling did and what he said about it. It's a wonderful mix of science and personal experience, and I found it a very engaging read.you said: Where did you hear this? And have you tried it? As I said, I take 9g a day. I used to take less but I found that the frequency of my colds diminished markedly when I got to that amount. My daughter, who is 4, is currently taking 6g a day in divided doses because she's been a little snuffly. She hasn't actually had a bad cold, or any other kind of virus or infection, since I started giving her vitamin C. If someone is getting an upset stomach and diarrhoea at 2g, then the following options should be considered: that their body is not used to it and they need to introduce the vitamin more gradually; that the particular supplement form of ascorbic acid they are taking does not agree with them and they should try another; or that they should divide the dosage up throughout the day. Again, there are more specifics in Pauling's book.You asked me about colloidal minerals. Is that what you want me to discuss from Barrett's website? This is getting pretty time-consuming and I'd like to try to narrow the field of discussion.Your question about my statement regarding cortisol and herbs is addressed in my post to Molbiogirl.Can I just say, finally, that if you pride yourself on your scientific methods, why don't you try a naturopathic method that is perfectly safe, and just see for yourself? I suggest diet. Give yourself 2 weeks on the Paleolithic Diet. You'd have to be prepared at first to feel worse, while your body adjusts, but be patient and see. I doubt if anyone here would sincerely take me up on that offer, but what if you found that you actually felt a lot better? It's very easy to sit at your computer and criticise things. Sometimes the answer to "How do I know if it really works" might be as simple as "Try it and see for yourself."

Hi Modulous, I'll pick up on a few of your points here.You said: Well yes, but this isn't the case with psychotropic drugs. What happened to me isn't an oddity. And not so many people find help from these drugs. Several studies, including the National Institutes of Health-funded STAR*D trial (Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression), have shown complete remission rates as low as 7%. Most studies show that antidepressants have only a marginal efficacy above placebo. And it's easy to manipulate scientific studies when the company conducting them has an interest in getting a certain result.Also, few people report side effects for a variety of reasons. I can dig around for a source for this if you want but I know I've read about it several times. Sexual side effects themselves were at first said to be rare on ADs, but I've seen estimates from more recent articles that put their occurrence as high as 80%. That's an impossible question. All I am able to give is anecdotal evidence. People join my ND's list all the time who have been off the drugs for months or even years and have never got well. They join the list and they start to get well. If these people saw their GPs it is likely that they would have been told that they were still mentally ill and needed to continue to take their drugs, or that they'd developed a new disorder for which a different drug was required, or that they had some other kind of illness and needed to get tests done. I don't object to tests being done. I'd like someone to do them on me so that there would be quantifiable evidence of the damage that's been done to my body from that drug. But things don't happen that way unfortunately. I persuaded my doctor to do some blood tests at one point but they were all normal. Damage to the CNS isn't going to show up in the blood.You mentioned that conventional medicine can "cure" by removing an inflamed appendix. I did say in one of my posts here that modern medicine can perform some amazing feats of surgery. I'd go to the hospital if I had a broken leg. And some drugs can be life-saving. Maybe I should clarify; What do MEDICATIONS, apart from antibiotics, cure?You said, about ADs again: You've been listening to the media and the brainwashed GPs. No psychotropic med "restores" normal brain function. They create brain abormalities and physiological imbalances that didn't previously exist. Check out what Dr. Breggin says about this. I will link to his site again: Breggin.com | HomeAlso, I know plenty of people who never functioned "well enough" to talk to a counsellor (if one is even offered; I can't talk to one on the NHS here). One of the people I know who successfully sued Glaxo tried to kill herself on Paxil, and tried to kill her husband with a knife. She didn't have a history of psychosis before she took the drug, and has not had any such episode since.You ask again, which is more effective, naturopathy or allopathic medicine? I'd say it depends. I feel a lot better now that I am on the Paleo diet and supplements. If I start having sugar or things with flour in them, my body now reacts by giving me stomach cramps, headache, depression, quite a number of things. It isn't used to those anymore and doesn't want them. And I love the calmness I experience from taking extra magnesium. I also know that by taking fish oil, I am helping to restore my body's natural EFA balance. These things will factor into my health not only now, but for years to come.My ND is also a neurologist. I feel I'm getting the best of all worlds with her. She has expertise in many fields. This is also why she knows about the effects of psychotropic drugs in the body and brain, and why she is so keen to help people who have been damaged by them. She sees others in her profession doing heinous things and making people's lives miserable.Most of this is anecdotal, but it suffices for me. It's probably not enough to convince any skeptics here but maybe I've at least given a little food for thought in my posts.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

OK, I'm happy to call it a day here. I've spent five or six hours on the computer today, and replying to all the posts here would require that much and more. I owe it to myself to go out and live a bit.I can't play the logic game very well yet, and I'm not going to be able to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt here that my experiences are valid, or that my ND has helped anyone, or for that matter that anything I've claimed is absolutely true. I am not capable of giving the sort of evidence here people want. My ND probably is, she's been to med school and she keeps up with current scientific papers.I'm glad I found her because I believe she has helped me, and many others immensely. I've seen for myself what happens when I'm on the Paleo Diet, I don't need to back it up for myself with scientific studies. That may satisfy no one here but it does me. I suppose many creationists end up saying this as well. Never mind.I'm going to stick with the Poltergeist topic, and with lurking in the science areas where I might be able to learn something. I don't think debating like this is really for me, I'd rather have a friendly chat with someone.

Buzsaw you are very kind. I don't know why I came back here to be honest, but I'm glad I did. I now have three names to look up: Dr. Lorrain Day (from PurpleDawn's earlier discussion), Deborah Ray, and Dr. Julian Whitaker. Did you know, Dr. Mercola also started out as a mainstream practitioner. So did Dr. Brooks, whose book I recommended earlier. Many of them had problems themselves, or their relatives did, which conventional medicine was at a loss to remedy. On Dr. Mercola's site, there is a story from Dr. Russell Blaylock, another ND, called "How 'Modern Medicine' Killed My Brother." http://www.mercola.com/2004/nov/24/modern_medicine.htm I found it very moving.I can see now that many people here will accept nothing as "proof" other than a study published in a peer-reviewed journal. I can understand why that would be the case; if you are a scientist, then to do otherwise would be unprofessional, that just isn't how science works. However, now that I'm involved in discussions myself, I am seeing that this often seems to be applied across the board, in all aspects of life. People take the PoV that they won't consider an idea unless it is first proved to be true, i.e. through scientific studies published in peer-reviewed journals. Personal experience is meaningless. Other people's experiences are meaningless. I don't know how I can argue with this Buz. I've seen the personal hell I've been through the past year and a half dismissed as irrelevant. It's been suggested that I have some kind of disorder and that I should go see my GP (even though the symptoms clearly began exactly when I came off the drug, and psych drugs are known to cause withdrawal -- funny, that). What the hell would he do? Put me on another sodding drug. The first one never helped me at all and I still haven't recovered from coming off it. I mentioned the person I know who sued Glaxo because on Paxil she tried to kill herself and her husband. All irrelevant. I think I reached a limit there. This attitude is the height of callousness. People here don't seem to think that it matters that people are damaged and killed by these drugs, as long as the statistics are insignificant enough, and they are willing to believe the propaganda that these drugs "save lives" because it says so in peer-reviewed studies -- even though, I think it was Modulous who agreed, that these studies can be manipulated. I looked up some info on STAR*D, which he seems to think was a conclusive study that showed that these drugs save lives, but if I shared it here, then what? I don't know Buz, I think that by arguing I let my emotions get in the way too much and I end up feeling exhausted and low, which I just don't need.Witness how Dr. Breggin is dismissed here because of disputes over his credentials. Has anyone actually looked at any of the articles on his website? Probably not, because he is also irrelevant isn't he? Is someone who criticised the establishment going to be accepted by the establishment? OK, how about two more MDs who are a little more mainstream but who also are critical of biological psychiatry: Dr. David Healy, and Dr. Joanna Moncrieff. I have one of Healy's books, which is a history of psychopharmacology in the 20th century, titled The Anti-Depressant Era. Here is an article by Dr. Moncrief in which she discusses the placebo effect in antidepressant studies, titled "The Antidepressant Debate": The British Journal of Psychiatry | Cambridge CoreThe experiences that I and others on my ND's list have had, and are having, are very real. I may not be able to argue scientifically for their validity, but maybe that just means I wouldn't make a good scientist. My ND spends a lot of time helping people on the list. None of us pay her and she's not selling anything; what she gets out of it is knowing that she is helping people. She told me to stay away from here and let my cortisol settle back down LOL. I might do that yet but it's great to finally meet you Buz. Thanks for the welcome Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Do you accept studies in peer-reviewed journals as a law unto themselves, i.e. they must be true because of their very nature? I will seriously consider what you are saying about Pauling if you can find a study that repeated his methods exactly, including the amounts of vitamin C that he used. So far the abstracts given here have not used the correct amounts. Yet you still dismiss Pauling as a "loon"; if you are basing that on these kinds of studies then that is disingenuous.

That studies published in the most prestigious journals can be flawed. Do you not agree yourself that this can happen? For example, the STAR*D study that was much-touted. According to NIMH, 27.5% of patients had a remission on the first antidepressant they tried. When the drug was switched or more drugs were added another 21-30% of the non-responders remitted. A switch to a third antidepressant worked for 20% of those who didn't respond to the first two drugs.While such results might appear promising, there are some things to bear in mind. They first excluded from the study anyone who was known not to respond to the drugs they were testing or even to SSRI antidepressants in general. Moreover, there was no placebo control in this study. Why not? Perhaps because most AD studies show little or no efficacy over placebo. It is not standard practice for an AD study not to include a placebo group. Additionally, spontaneous remission rates for depression are often estimated at being 20-30%; the majority of people get better within 6 months, with or without treatment.This study does not show that ADs help millions of people, though I'll hazard a bet that many were put on the drugs anyway after this study was published. You see web sites crowing, "third time's the charm." What you don't see are studies on how stopping these meds abruptly and switching them affects the body and specifically the CNS. No one seems to be interested in doing those.NIMH also hired researchers for this study with extensive financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the ADs that were studied. As I said, the case with most of these kinds of studies is that they are done by the very people who manufacture the drugs and who have a vested interest in a certain outcome. I would like to see many more independent studies done with no such conflict of interest. That study was from 2000. Dr. Mercola said at the time of writing that he hadn't seen the study and so he couldn't comment on its methodology, but that it sounded like more study would be needed. It would be helpful to at least see an abstract. Dr. Mercola actually does not advise people to take vitamins, for the most part. But his word is not law, and I feel it's important to get info from a variety of sources before making up one's mind. I'll link to this site again, because orthomolecular medicine does involve giving vitamin megadoses: Welcome To Orthomolecular.org You might be interested in reading the link there titled "Rationale for Intravenous Vitamin C in Cancer Patients." My daughter and I have been taking more vitamin C than this for 2 years and it has never been a problem. Nor has it been when my husband is taking it. They're quite simply wrong. He gives an extensive bibliography, but I've had to hunt out the study citations from the text. It is not a book written for scientists, though it does get a bit heavy on the molecular science at times. He was clearly very aware of research being done by others at the time and was influenced by it. Unfortunately, in citing studies by anyone, all this book provides is a name and a year.They're not hard to find if you spend a little time Googling though. Here is a link with dozens: http://www.doctoryourself.com/biblio_pauling_ortho.html

Your discussion of peer-reviewed studies is sound Percy; faint praise coming from a non-scientist maybe, but I do see abstracts cited here as if they themselves represent the final proof of the issue. As I have said, these studies can potentially be flawed in a number of ways, and it behooves anyone to look at them critically before they accept what the scientists have said as fact. Case in point, as I mentioned above, was STAR*D.That is what I meant by the "correct amounts" of vitamin C. Not that there are any such Platonic ideals out there, but that the scientists who do these studies need to verify the amounts that Pauling used if they aim to replicate his results. Pauling himself was continually frustrated by studies that received widespread media coverage claiming that he was wrong about vitamin C; time and time again he investigated them, and found they had used significantly less than the amount that he had used, or that the vitamin had been given orally instead of intravenously.I take your point about there being few peer-reviewed studies about diet and vitamins. I want to see more research and more trials. Who will do them though, and who will pay? The mainstream is not interested. Look at what happened to Pauling. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin C. There should have been much more research done after this. Instead those flawed studies were conducted, interest dwindled, and now few people believe or are even aware of Pauling's recommendations. The money is all in the pharmaceuticals. It's a big motivator.I also get your point about anecdotes. If you are a skeptic, correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't accept them as evidence. If 100 people say something, it might simply mean that 100 people are wrong. However, there's always the possibility that some of them are right. Or even all of them. By dismissing each person's testimony you are also possibly dismissing some windows to the truth. I and many other people I have met, have had powerful experiences brought about by the medications we took, and we support each other in healing. I repeat, that may mean nothing to a skeptical mind, but I know it works for me. I've been discussing skepticism in 2 other threads here as well. It's a topic I've never discussed with anyone before and I'm interested to find out how people apply it in their lives.

My ND helps people who have been damaged by these drugs. She knows what they can do to the body, but also that people have biochemical individuality and react in a huge spectrum of ways to them. So no, I don't see how she's wrong.I also quite accept that many people do not have the sort of negative experience I had, and even feel that they've been helped or that their lives have got back on track, as you said. If that's the case for you and your friend then I am glad, and I hope that neither of you will have to feel that you need to take the meds again.However, I said earlier here that naturopathy views mental illness (including depression) as a symptom, rather than a disease in itself. A number of things can cause it: nutritional deficienies, toxins in or outside of the body, stress, life circumstances, etc. (Please, no one ask me for peer-reviewed studies for this. I think we've established that people don't seem to want to do studies on these things.) Depression is often a signal that something in one's life needs changing. Sometimes even if a person feels that a drug has relieved their depression, it might also have relieved them of the need to take responsibility for putting right whatever had gone wrong and caused the depression in the first place. There are no guarantees that these problems won't still exist, or recur, once the drug is discontinued. Pain, whether physical or emotional, tells us that something is wrong. These drugs numb the pain.If you feel you have addressed the underlying cause of the depression or whatever the reason was that you took the drug, then that's great. Sometimes it can take a person years to work this out, and some never do.Too many doctors prescribe a drug without looking into the kinds of factors I mentioned above. Nutritional deficiencies can cause depression; sugar can cause it. Sugar acts on opiate receptors in the body. If you look up the definitions of deficiency diseases like pellagra or beri beri, you will find that mental illness can be a symptom. Most people in the developed world do not develop full-blown deficiency diseases, but according to most NDs many Americans have subclinical deficiencies due to the standard American diet (SAD).I'm talking here from life experience, from the shared experiences of others who have taken these kinds of drugs, from the advice that my ND has given me, and from what I've read in books and articles by people like Dr. Breggin, Dr. Healy and Dr. Moncrieff. Again I know it's anecdotal, but it's the best I can do in the absence of clinical studies.Linus Pauling's mother suffered chronic mental illness for years. It was only upon her death that her physicians realised that she had been suffering from pernicious anaemia. If anyone had thought to check her blood levels of B12 and given her an injection, it would have saved her. This was one possible motivator for Pauling's subsequent interest in vitamins.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

What was said here was that 2000mg of vitamin C causes stomach pain and diarrhoea. It was not qualified, which makes this an absolute statement. The fact that I and people I know can take 10 times this amount with no stomach pain or diarrhoea would rather cast doubt on its validity.

Can you link to an abstract at all? I think it's important to know the methodology, the amounts, what -- if any -- illnesses were present, what the study was aiming to discover, etc.

I see. We're interpreting the statement differently. I have been taking it to say that "it is thus" with no exceptions. Looking at it in a more logical way, I can see now what you mean. I'd like to see where this statement originated -- one or two places?I know someone who can't take any vitamin C supplements at all. She is an extremely ill person with a number of things wrong with her. My ND says that sometimes the body gets into a kind of defensive mode and rejects much of what is put into it, harmful or helpful, and in that case the helpful things need to be introduced very slowly and carefully. Again . . . anecdote. Maybe this isn't the best place to be saying these things, I'm not going to be winning any debating points.