Is it time to question our reliance—some would say, over-reliance—on antidepressants to ease the pain of depression, which seems to be so common these days?

A 2010 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that anti-depressants such as Paxil are only effective for the most severely depressed patients.  Only the most severely depressed were even included in the studies, and only the most depressed among those were found to benefit from the medication.

Is the public being subjected to false advertising?  “The important feature of this evidence base is not reflected in the implicit messages present in the marketing of these medications to clinicians and the public,” said the researchers, who studied the results of 6 different studies on the effectiveness of anti-depressant medications.

Despite warnings from experts and research showing anti-depressants aren’t effective except in the most severe cases, usage of feel good pills is booming.  Between 1996 and 2005, prescription of antidepressants in the US more than doubled, from 13 million to 27 million.  Drug companies quadrupled their spending on direct-to-consumer advertising between 1999 and 2005.  Drug companies spent $122 million dollars a year in 2005 to sell $10 billion worth of anti-depressant drugs in 2009.

Why should an alternative to having a tenth of the American population on mood-altering drugs be considered?  Our current situation could bear an uncanny resemblance to the drugged and controlled populace described by Aldous Huxley in 1984. In his novel, the public was so addicted and pleased with their use of the drug Huxley called soma that they failed to notice their freedoms and rights were being callously stolen by their own government.

In “My Chemical Romance,” a story of getting off the anti-depressants he’d been using for 10 years without ever demonstrating a clinical need for them, writer Chris Norris describes his months long struggle to live a drug-free existence. Psychiatrist Peter Greggin and sociologist David Karp found that using these drugs can in effect burn out the body’s own ability to produce serotonin, which is essential in preventing depression.  In other words, taking anti-depressants could make you much more depressed than you were to start with, if you ever stop taking them.

If there were a cure—or at least treatment–for depression that was effective, had no side effects, and could be used by anyone interested, wouldn’t that merit trying?

Practitioners of an Access Consciousness™ hands on method called “Access Bars™” say there is.  Dr. Dain Heer, Co-Creator of Access Consciousness™, publicly credits his first bars session with permanently curing him of suicidal depression.  Then a struggling doctor, he used to lie in bed in the mornings planning the date for his own suicide.  At his first bars session, he giggled non-stop and never contemplated suicide again.

While the results are not necessarily so instantly dramatic for everyone, Gary Douglas, the discoverer of the Bars and founder of Access Consciousness, states, “The worst that can happen is that you’ll feel more relaxed than after a great massage.  The best that can happen is your whole life can change.”

Whether the results from an individual session are dramatic or not, one doctor who frequently receives the bars reports the bars absolutely work for stress relief.  “Whatever I’m worried about when I lie down on the table, I can’t hold onto it,” she says.  “By the time the hour is up, whatever was bothering me is long gone.  It’s great!”

Those who have tried meditation with or without success report that the stillness and inner peace that they seek while trying to “quiet the mind” in meditation is achievable without effort when someone else touches the specific points on their head.

There are 32 of those points, which are activated by simple light touch so simple a child can learn it.  In fact, often sessions performed by children are more effective than an adult’s because the kids have fewer preconceptions about what is not possible.

Each of the 32 points relates to an issue that causes us difficulty here on earth—money, control, body, sexuality, healing are just a few of them.  Negativity in the form of fixed beliefs, decisions, emotions, and judgments from many lifetimes are electrically stored in these points.  Touching these points releases that stored limitation, magically melting away our limitations on the subject and allowing new possibilities we couldn’t see before to appear.

Several doctors who are experts in biofeedback have reported on the brain wave changes they experienced while receiving the bars.  They reported moving from beta to alpha into theta brain waves, the waves of the deep relaxed state.

You’ve never heard of the bars, you say?  Just how available is this method?  Quite available, it turns out.  There are currently more than 700 licensed facilitators of the bars—people who have been licensed by Gary Douglas to not only perform a bars session on you, but also to facilitate the day long class in which you can learn to do the bars on yourself and others.  These facilitators span 25 countries from the U.S. to India to Turkey to Australia.

Anyone who has completed the bars class once is qualified to perform a session on you if you choose, and Bars classes are offered daily all over the globe.

You can find more information about the Bars, as well as a practitioner near you, by checking the Access Bars™ website.

 
 
It Just Takes Lots of Pharmaceutical Industry Cash

by Food Matters’ Andrew W. Saul PhD
Editor, Orthomolecular Medicine News Service

(OMNS, Oct 20, 2011) Recent much trumpeted anti-vitamin news is the product of pharmaceutical company payouts. No, this is not one of “those” conspiracy theories. Here’s how it’s done:

1) Cash to study authors. Many of the authors of a recent negative vitamin E paper (1) have received substantial income from the pharmaceutical industry. The names are available in the last page of the paper (1556) in the “Conflict of Interest” section. You will not see them in the brief summary at the JAMA website. A number of the study authors have received money from pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, AstraZeneca, Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Amgen, Firmagon, and Novartis.

2) Advertising revenue. Many popular magazines and almost all major medical journals receive income from the pharmaceutical industry. The only question is, how much? Pick up a copy of the publication and count the pharmaceutical ads. The more space sold, the more revenue for the publication. If you try to find their advertisement revenue, you’ll see that they don’t disclose it. So, just count the Pharma ads. Look in them all: Readers Digest http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n11.shtml , JAMA, Newsweek, Time, AARP Today, NEJM, Archives of Pediatrics. Even Prevention magazine. Practically any major periodical.

3) Rigged trials. Yes, it is true and yes it is provable. In a recent editorial, we explained how trials of new drugs are often rigged at http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v04n20.shtml . Studies of the health benefits of vitamins and essential nutrients also appear to be rigged. This can be easily done by using low doses to guarantee a negative result, and by biasing the interpretation to show a statistical increase in risk.

4) Bias in what is published, or rejected for publication. The largest and most popular medical journals receive very large income from pharmaceutical advertising. Peer-reviewed research indicates that this influences what they print, and even what study authors conclude from their data. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n02.shtml .

5) Censorship of what is indexed and available to doctors and the public. Public tax money pays for censorship in the largest public medical library on the planet: the US National Library of Medicine (MEDLINE/PubMed). http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n03.shtml. See also: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n05.shtml.

Don’t Believe It?

How well were these pro-vitamin, anti-drug studies covered in the mass media?
  • A Harvard study showed a 27% reduction in AIDS deaths among patients given vitamin supplements. (2)
  • There have been no deaths from vitamins in 27 years. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v07n05.shtml
  • Antibiotics cause 700,000 emergency room visits per year, just in the US. (3)
  • Modern drug-and-cut medicine is at least the third leading cause of death in the USA. Some estimates place medicine as the number one cause of death. (4)
  • Over 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by drug errors in hospitals, doctors’ offices, and nursing homes. If in a hospital, a patient can expect at least one medication error every single day. (5)
  • More than 100,000 patients die every year, just in the US, from drugs properly prescribed and taken as directed. (6)
Double Standard

Countless comedians have made fun of the incompetent physician who, when called late at night during a life- threatening disease crisis, says, “take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” It’s no longer funny. One of the largest pharmaceutical conglomerates in the world ran prime- time national television commercials that declared: “Bayer aspirin may actually help stop you from dying if you take it during a heart attack.” The company also promotes such use of its product on the Internet. http://www.wonderdrug.com/, formerly http://www.bayeraspirin.com/news/heart_attack.htm

Daily Aspirin Use Linked With Pancreatic Cancer

Here’s something you may have not seen. Research has shown that women who take just one aspirin a day, “which millions do to prevent heart attack and stroke as well as to treat headaches - may raise their risk of getting deadly pancreatic cancer…. Pancreatic cancer affects only 31,000 Americans a year, but it kills virtually all its victims within three years. The study of 88,000 nurses found that those who took two or more aspirins a week for 20 years or more had a 58 percent higher risk of pancreatic cancer.” (7) Women who took two or more aspirin tablets per day had an alarming 86 percent greater risk of pancreatic cancer.

Study author Dr. Eva Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School was quoted as saying: “Apart from smoking, this is one of the few risk factors that have been identified for pancreatic cancer. Initially we expected that aspirin would protect against pancreatic cancer.”

How about that.

Say: What if there was one, just one case of pancreatic cancer caused by a vitamin? What do you think the press would have said about that?

The fact is, vitamins are known to be effective and safe. They are essential nutrients, and when taken at the proper doses over a lifetime, are capable of preventing a wide variety of diseases. Because drug companies can’t make big profits developing essential nutrients, they have a vested interest in agitating for the use of drugs and disparaging the use of nutritional supplements.

(Orthomolecular Medicine News Service editor Andrew W. Saul taught nutrition, health science and cell biology at the college level, and has published over 100 reviews and editorials in peer-reviewed publications. He is author or co-author of ten books and is featured in the documentary film Food Matters. His website is http://www.doctoryourself.com .)

References:
1. Klein EA, Thompson Jr, IM, Tangen CM et al. JAMA. 2011;306(14):1549-1556. http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/306/14/1549
2. Fawzi WW, Msamanga GI, Spiegelman D, Wei R, Kapiga S, Villamor E, Mwakagile D, Mugusi F, Hertzmark E, Essex M, Hunter DJ. A randomized trial of multivitamin supplements and HIV disease progression and mortality. N Engl J Med. 2004 Jul 1;351(1):23-32.
3. Associated Press, Oct 17, 2006. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15305033/
4. Null G, Dean C, Feldman M, Rasio D. Death by medicine. J Orthomolecular Med, 2005. 20: 1, 21-34. http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2005/pdf/2005-v20n01-p021.pdf
5. The Associated Press. Drug errors injure more than 1.5 million a year. July 20, 2006. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13954142
6. Leape LL. Institute of Medicine medical error figures are not exaggerated. JAMA, 2000. Jul 5;284(1):95-7; Leape LL. Error in medicine. JAMA, 1994. Dec 21;272(23):1851-7; Lazarou J, Pomeranz BH, Corey PN. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. JAMA, 1998. Apr 15;279(15):1200-5.
7. Fox M. Daily aspirin use linked with pancreatic cancer. Reuters, Oct 27, 2003. http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/10/27/cancer.aspirin.reut/index.html

Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org

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To locate an orthomolecular physician near you: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n09.shtml

The peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service is a non-profit and non-commercial informational resource.

Editorial Review Board:
Ian Brighthope, M.D. (Australia)
Ralph K. Campbell, M.D. (USA)
Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. (Canada)
Damien Downing, M.D. (United Kingdom)
Michael Ellis, M.D. (Australia)
Martin P. Gallagher, M.D., D.C. (USA)
Michael Gonzalez, D.Sc., Ph.D. (Puerto Rico)
William B. Grant, Ph.D. (USA)
Steve Hickey, Ph.D. (United Kingdom)
James A. Jackson, Ph.D. (USA)
Michael Janson, M.D. (USA)
Robert E. Jenkins, D.C. (USA)
Bo H. Jonsson, M.D., Ph.D. (Sweden)
Thomas Levy, M.D., J.D. (USA)
Jorge R. Miranda-Massari, Pharm.D. (Puerto Rico)
Erik Paterson, M.D. (Canada)
W. Todd Penberthy, Ph.D. (USA)
Gert E. Shuitemaker, Ph.D. (Netherlands)
Robert G. Smith, Ph.D. (USA)
Jagan Nathan Vamanan, M.D. (India)
Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. (USA), Editor and contact person. Email: omns@orthomolecular.org