Orthomolecular Nutrition to the Rescue!

Feeding Minds, Feeding Bodies
Written by Rosalie Moscoe
Monday, 29 December 2008


Orthomolecular Nutrition to the Rescue!

My husband and I waved goodbye as we watched our son John (not his real name) board the plane, happily joking with his buddies. The year was 1989. John was 19, and headed for what we expected to be a wonderful youth tour overseas; indeed, for the first few weeks he called home to say what a good time he was having. But after the fourth week, we received a shocking phone call. The trip organizers were sending him home. John had become paranoid and delusional; he had been taken to a hospital after fainting at the top of a mountain.
We left on the next plane and returned with a young man who not only looked physically ill and emaciated but also was totally psychotic. We were devastated.
John was hospitalized for a short time and was released with antipsychotic medication. The doctor told us it was “psychosis”. His personality changed. Our outgoing, friendly, affectionate boy and talented musician now spent hours in his room, asleep. Awake, he suffered Parkinson-like tremors and tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of his medication.
His progress was negligible and within a year, he was hospitalized with symptoms of schizophrenia. Upon his release, John was marginally better. Schizophrenia prognosis was dim. What was to become of him?
Frantically I searched for answers. Traditional texts left me feeling hopeless. By sheer luck, I came across a book by psychiatrist, Dr. Abram Hoffer, M.D. PhD., psychiatrist, and a scholar of bio-chemistry. The book (now renamed Healing Schizophrenia) discussed diets with healthy nutrients, free of allergens that could help his condition. (Hoffer is the author of 31 books and 500 research papers.)
Also emphasized were nutrition health benefits of nutrients in supplement form such as Vitamin B3 (niacin) and Vitamin C – both natural and essential to the human body for restoring health along with other nutrients.
Orthomolecular medicine is the practice of optimizing health and treating disease by providing correct amounts of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, essential fatty acids and other substances which are natural to the body’s environment. In other words, find out what’s missing in the body and brain and give it what it needs and wants. Orthomolecular treatments are also safe to use along with medication.

Link

Antidepressants in the water? Don't try to make wine

Nowadays we hear a lot about antidepressants and other drug residues in water. Here's an unexpected side effect: Antidepressants kill yeast cell mitochondria. That's bad news for fans of wine and beer - or baking.

"Since the first mitochondrial dysfunction was described in the 1960s, the medicine has advanced in its understanding the role mitochondria play in health and disease. Damage to mitochondria is now understood to play a role in the pathogenesis of a wide range of seemingly unrelated disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, migraine headaches, strokes, neuropathic pain, Parkinson’s disease, ataxia, transient ischemic attack, cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, retinitis pigmentosa, diabetes, hepatitis C, and primary biliary cirrhosis. Medications have now emerged as a major cause of mitochondrial damage, which may explain many adverse effects. All classes of psychotropic drugs have been documented to damage mitochondria, as have stain medications, analgesics such as acetaminophen, and many others. While targeted nutrient therapies using antioxidants or their prescursors (e. g., N-acetylcysteine) hold promise for improving mitochondrial function, there are large gaps in our knowledge. The most rational approach is to understand the mechanisms underlying mitochondrial damage for specific medications and attempt to counteract their deleterious effects with nutritional therapies. This article reviews our basic understanding of how mitochondria function and how medications damage mitochondria to create their occasionally fatal adverse effects."
See this abstract.

What does your medication do to YOUR mitochondria?

Actual Cost of Making Popular Prescription Drugs

Actual Cost Of Making These Popular Prescription Drugs
Posted November 8, 2003 thepeoplesvoice.org

From Dr. Betty Martini
From JUDICIAL REFORM INVESTIGATIONS / justice@court.to

Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the Active ingredient in prescription medications? Some people think it must cost a lot, since many drugs sell for more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed in past issues of Life Extension, a significant percentage of drugs sold in the United States contain active ingredients made in other countries.

In our independent investigation of how much profit drug companies really make, we obtained the actual price of active ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America. The chart
here speaks for itself.

Diagnosis: Greed

Sir William Osler

"About three decades ago, it became possible to make serious money as a university researcher. Not that the money was so bad before, of course. It was respectable. But it wasn’t Wall Street-type money.
That changed in the early 1980s with the passage of legislation that allowed universities to patent their publicly funded research results and then grant exclusive licenses to pharmaceutical companies. The public-private wall came down. The universities received royalties on the drugs, and the royalties were split between the researchers and the departments. Start-up companies were spun off and sold. University researchers became, essentially, partners to industry.

The change wasn’t just structural, however. There was a cultural shift, a kind of boundary melt.
“Greed became respectable,” Angell, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, recalled. “There used to be a sort of tension between doing well and doing good for medical researchers. If they wanted to make a lot of money in a high-risk sort of job they could work for industry. If they wanted to do important, exciting research they stayed in academia and they had a comfortable life but not great wealth.

“Before 1980, they were aware of this tension,” she said. “Before 1980, those who went into industry were held in some disdain. With Reagan, all this changed. There was a strong feeling that the world divided into winners and losers. In medical research this just has had enormous implications.”

It’s had enormous implications for our world generally. On Wall Street, change had to come via catastrophe. Let’s hope it won’t take a disaster to bring sense back to medicine."

Article here.



Also see BLIND FAITH, a four-part series about Pharma blandishments in Academe, here.

Eli Lilly - Guilty!

Eli Lilly and Company Agrees to Pay $1.415 Billion to Resolve Allegations
of Off-label Promotion of Zyprexa
$515 Million Criminal Fine Is Largest Individual Corporate Criminal Fine in History; Civil
Settlement up to $800 Million
American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company today agreed to plead guilty and pay $1.415 billion for
promoting its drug Zyprexa for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of
Justice announced today. This resolution includes a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care
case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal
prosecution of any kind. Eli Lilly will also pay up to $800 million in a civil settlement with the federal government
and the states.
Eli Lilly agreed to enter a global resolution with the United States to resolve criminal and civil allegations that
it promoted its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for uses not approved by the FDA, the Department said. Such
unapproved uses are also known as "off-label" uses because they are not included in the drug’s FDA approved
product label.
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Gregory G. Katsas and acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania Laurie Magid today announced the filing of a criminal information against Eli Lilly for
promoting Zyprexa for uses not approved by the FDA. Eli Lilly, headquartered in Indianapolis, is charged in the
information with promoting Zyprexa for such off-label or unapproved uses as treatment for dementia, including
Alzheimer’s dementia, in elderly people.
The company has signed a plea agreement admitting its guilt to a misdemeanor criminal charge. Eli Lilly also
signed a civil settlement to resolve civil claims that by marketing Zyprexa for unapproved uses, it caused false
claims for payment to be submitted to federal insurance programs such as Medicaid, TRICARE and the Federal
Employee Health Benefits Program, none of which provided coverage for such off-label uses.
Department of Justice document is here.

A deep bow of respect to investigative journalist Philip Dawdy, without whose dedication and personal sacrifices this result might never have been reached. Visit him at Furious Seasons.

Pharmer's Market: Bill Maher Talks About Big Pharma

Lancet, AHRP: Who Beguiled Doctors?

ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION Promoting Openness, Full
Disclosure, and Accountability http://www.ahrp.org and
http://ahrp.blogspot.com
FYI
"The current issue of The Lancet, includes a meta-analysis comparing
the efficacy of old and new neuroleptics--a.k.a. first generation
antipsychotics and 'atypical' second generation antipsychotics. The
findings corroborate the fact that the new drugs are no better than
the old antipsychotics.
See:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(08)617...
A Commentary in the same issue, "The Spurious Advance of Antipsychotic
Drug Therapy," by Dr. Peter Tyrer, professor of community psychiatry,
Imperial College, London, and Tim Kendal, MD, co-director of the
Royal College of Psychiatrists' national collaborating centre for
mental health, leads one to conclude that doctors have been 'conned'
by drug manufacturers:
"The new generation of drugs, known as atypicals, were heralded as
safer and more effective than the earlier antipsychotics, and for
the past 20 years doctors have been bbeguiledb into thinking they
were superior."
'The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as
invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for
marketing purposes and only now being exposed.' (Source: Lancet,
2009; 373: 4-5; 31-41).
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(08)617...
We would beg to disagree: given the active (duplicitous) role of
prominent academic psychiatrists, as well the major professional
associations in psychiatrybthe American Psychiatric Association,
the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the American Academy
of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, et al in promoting the second
generation antipsychotics, it is unfair to lay blame entirely on
the pharmaceutical industry...."
Continue reading here.