Call Out: PsychOUT: A Conference for Organizing Resistance Against Psychiatry

Nor were either Sineed or I talking about anyone's specific situation or making recommendations on what they should or should not do.  We both have been talking about the larger picture - some things have been shown not to work consistently.  For my own part, I specifically said that I would consider an individual's experience as anecdote to constitute an unknown due to a lack of full information.  And that would be the problem with anecdote vs controlled study.

You are inventing malice where there is none.

Timebandit wrote:

You are inventing malice where there is none.

intent is no excuse, hurtful statements are judged by the recievers not by the speakers

you can microaggression a dozen times with multiple people telling you to please stop and you'll keep going until someone stops you

I don't think I made any claims about absolute truth.  I don't actually think such a thing exists.

However, when there's demonstrated evidence for something, and ephemeral evidence (if any) for another thing, I don't think it's wrong to point that out.

I wouldn't have a problem with homeopathy or other remedies that show no effectiveness in trial if it weren't for the horror stories.  I really wish those weren't true.  But they are.  And so is the lying and shysterism of the worst practitioners.

I've been a student of kung fu for about 9 years now.  My teacher is also a naturopath.  I know that he practices responsibly and that he would actually counsel his patients to use his services in concert with their mainstream medical professional.  I wish they were all like him, but they're not. 

Timebandit wrote:

I've been a student of kung fu for about 9 years now.  My teacher is also a naturopath.  I know that he practices responsibly and that he would actually counsel his patients to use his services in concert with their mainstream medical professional.  I wish they were all like him, but they're not. 

Nutritional medicine has become warmly embraced by naturopaths, but the history of orthomolecular medicine is definitely medical doctors leading the way.  I don't understand how it got branded 'alternative'. The only difference with an orthomolecular doctor is that they look at the foods you eat and will look at vitamin and mineral imbalances as a way of treating as well.  They give out prescriptions just like everyone else. They are regular doctors.

Here is another comparison in perspective on nutritional medicine vs western medicine.

When you walk into a doctor's office, and have a problem, the doctor is the authority on your body and your health.  OK Fine.  They have devised an elaborate latinized naming convention which alientates people from their own bodies, and the doctor has complete authority and knowledge, and power. The doctor needs to perform the treatment to correct the problem, ie. write a prescription or perform a surgery.  The doctor needs to perform the miracles on the passive body.

With orthomolecular medicine, the person has a body which was designed from the time of birth to be self healing and self correcting. We eat and drink and sleep, and our bodies grow, and our body is constantly repairing itself.  When the nutritients coming in are less than the demand for nutrients, over time, that is how disease settles in. You correct this imbalance by restoring the nutrients to the level that the body needs, and then let the body heal and repair itself gradually over time.

100 years ago, medical researchers spent their time discovering these nutrients and exploring the role nutrients have on human health. 

I personally believe that when drug manufacturers found that vitamins could not be patented, and that vitamins were powerful healers, they abandoned vitamins for their own drugs that they could patent and the campaign has been on ever since to undermine the role food and proper nutrition has in human health.  Vitamins are cheaper, safer, and more effective than patented drugs.

Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm not.  It worked for me, and I have seen the successes in other peoples' lives as well.

Orthomolecular medicine does not believe that people can get their nutritional needs met simply by eating a proper diet.  You cannot leave a head of lettuce in the fridge for five days and expect it to have much nutritional value.  You cannot take a steak out of the freezer and thaw it and expect it to have as much nutritional value as something fresh.  That would leave vitamins to pick up the slack.

Goggles Pissano wrote:

I personally believe that when drug manufacturers found that vitamins could not be patented, and that vitamins were powerful healers, they abandoned vitamins for their own drugs that they could patent and the campaign has been on ever since to undermine the role food and proper nutrition has in human health.  

Well, this is certainly true with other substances - many that have been outlawed.

jas wrote:

Goggles, did Hoffer do any trials of his own? Excuse me if you've already posted this information.

Yes, he was the Director of Psychiatric Research at the University of Saskatchewan.

Back in the 1940s, Tommy Douglas was the Premier of Saskatchewan.  Douglas's home provincial constituency was in Weyburn, a small city which housed the Weyburn Mental Institution.  This Institution was known far and wide for its appauling living standards.  Douglas wanted to change that and funded the only undertaking of its kind EVER in the field of psychiatry.  He wanted to find a CURE for mental illness and addictions.

News of this project spread far and wide, and a team of medical doctors came to Canada from England just to participate in that study. The question was, is there a substance or substances that are produced naturally in the body that have a chemical molecular structure very similar to LSD?  Remember, LSD was not discovered until 1938. Also, this study was famous for another reason. 

After WWII, the United States was paranoid that the Soviet Union had a spy drug that erased peoples' memories. The US government had a very long file called Operation MK ULTRA, where they looked into mind control and mind erasure.  They figured that LSD was the drug that the Soviets had.  US Intelligence set up camp in Weyburn, and closely studied what was going on with Hoffer's studies.

They discovered and proved the Adreneline Hypothesis. When adreneline oxidizes, it forms a compound that is deep blood red in colour called adrenochrome.  When isolated and placed under the tongue, it is a hallucinogenic drug just like LSD.  In healthy people, adrenochrome rapidly converts to a substance called 5,6 di-hydroxy-N-methol-indole.  This compound when isolated has a banana yellow colour, and when injested, has a calm, relaxing effect on people.  People with schizophrenia do not get this banana yellow substance.  Instead their adrenochrome mixes with other compounds in the body and produces adrenolutin.  This compound when placed under the tongue of healthy subjects causes anger, agitation, paranoia, the other symptoms of schizophrenia when they are startled or under stress.

Vitamin C is a powerful antioxident.  In high doses, once the human body is finally saturated with it over time and it is maintained at those high levels, vitamin C will stop adreneline from oxidizing and converting to adrenochrome.  Vitamin B3 has a methyl receptor ending on it's molecular structure.  It will travel through the blood and neutralize the compounds in the bloodstream which react with adrenochrome to form adrenolutin. This will prevent adrenochrome from converting to adrenolutin, the substance which causes the paranoia, anger, and agitation.

Mainstream medicine, with all their drugs has never been able to get to the root cause of schizophrenia, nor to explain it.

When I had my nervous breakdown after an assault, I was told by my psychiatrist that I had endogenous depression, depression for no apparent reason. There are many many psychiatrists out there today who believe that stress plays no role in anxiety, depression, or schizophrenia. And the ones who do admit to the connection perhaps are pressured to be a little more humane because of the competition from psychologists, counsellors, and social workers who they compete with for market share.

Michelle Landsberg wrote in her book, Women and Children First, to the effect that "after examining the curriculum of psychiatrists and combing through their textbooks, only 1 1/2 pages is devoted to womens' issues."

The adrenaline adrenochrome hypothesis explains women having nervous breakdowns after years of spousal abuse, children incest survivors, rape survivors, random sexual assaults, post traumatic stress disorders from serving at war, etc. 

Hoffer says that all amine's when they oxidize produce their own chromes.  Dop-amine, makes dopachrome, which makes dopalutin, etc. If you watch the movie starring Robin Williams playing the psychiatrist who performed the encephalitis experiments in New York, and treated them with l-dopa, it stars Robert DeNiro as well.  The movie is called, Awakenings. First of all, you see the patients come alive who were in a coma for years.  Then as they keep increasing the dosage, they portray the personality changes.  It is the dopamine forming dopachrome, and then converting to dopalutin.

Dr Hoffer said that if he had known about these experiments, he would have told that doctor to prescribe high doses of vitamin C and vitamin B3 to counteract those chemical changes going on in their bodies, and instead of stopping the trials, which they did, those people could have gone home.

Anyhow, I am rambling.  Yes he did trials of his own.

Sineed wrote:

As for me, I'm not a scientist but I've been a practicing pharmacist for 26 years. I have been dismayed by the rise of complementary and alternative medicine (SCAM, for short), and have seen people come to harm from its use. For instance, I encountered a woman in hospital who didn't believe in modern medicine, and refused dialysis for her kidney failure, instead asking for "holistic" medicine that "treats the whole patient" (whatever that means). She quickly died. Then there was a neighbour, an elderly woman who slipped and fell on the ice, fracturing her wrist. She believed in homeopathic remedies and scorned "allopathic" medicine, and didn't seek treatment. Her wrist healed crooked and she couldn't use her hand properly for the remainder of her life.

I think instead of pointing fingers that the medical profession should take a good hard look in the mirror and ask the hard questions about why people have lost faith in that system and are looking into things like alt-medicine. Medical errors account for a great deal of distress, and in many cases, death. For instance, every major health problem my grandmother had was either brought on, worsened, or outright neglected by medical professionals. (For the last few years of her life, she was in severe abdominal pain that the doctors dismissed as, "she's old, what do you expect?") And it should come as no surprise to anyone on babble that the medical profession is subject to a great deal of lobbying. But if you want to take their word as gospel, you have to conclude that [url=http://lacrossetribune.com/news/local/study-no-great-health-benefit-from... food is no better than conventional food.[/url]

I must also say that I am disturbed by the dismissal of GP's experiences. I realize that it is technically anecdotal evidence, and that the plural of anecdote is not data, but to shrug it off as completely irrelevant is wrong. It's reminiscent to me of how people would dismiss childhood victims of sexual assault by claiming that they "must be imagining it."

Sineed wrote:

I've been working in addictions/mental health for a long time now. It sure would be nice[read: Hey, I'm patronizing you but I don't think you're smart enough to notice it] if schizophrenia could be cured by vitamins. People who work in health care are not sociopaths. We are not suppressing this knowledge. But that dog won't hunt. All you're doing here is encouraging vulnerable people to go off their meds, and also encouraging sales of vitamins.

thank you again for further illustrating the pervasive culture that we have been discussing here.

Since there has been no explicit motion by anyone here to discontinue one's own prescribed medication I must assume you believe everyone's lives are in imminent peril after they read something new to them. You have decided for others that you will be their resource for this decision and that is the most important thing in this moment. Actually you've been quite successful in picking up  the torch from the first people who interrupted this discussion and was then rebuffed. Best not to let others speak among themselves as equals, just gotta get that authority in there. hard..to..resist..

You do not subscribe to any harm reduction model or allow people to make choices and improve upon their health, on their own terms. I'm not interested in your concerns that an outsider who feels in the abscence of demonstrable intent the traditional model absolutely must be defended; even in midsentence when someone else is talking about how it wasn't working for them.

Again, orthomolecular medicine is NOT alternative medicine.  The old school doctors had a different opinion of vitamins and nutrition because the research into vitamins and nutrition was positive.  They studied nutrition before the large drug companies took over the direction of health care delivery in North America.  These doctors prescribed drugs just like any other doctor.  Please, get it out of your thick skulls that orthomolecular medicine is alternative. It is not.  In fact, it is going to be the medical standard of the future.

In the mean time, people with depression and schizophrenia are being chemically abused and tortured on existing drugs, and with mediocre benefit to them. All the treatments used by psychiatrists today are considered forms of torture: chemical restraints, physical restraints, imprisonment, ECT, lobotomies, solitary confinement, physical abuse by orderlies, loss of human rights...

Doctors are not going to give up their power. It has to come from public education on the reality of the abuse that mentally ill people face in the hands of psychiatry and then pressure to enforce changes.  Also remember, that these professionals insist that there is no cure.  I say that there is.  There is a huge ton of testimony from people saying that the existing way of doing things is fundamentally wrong and needs to be reformed.

Even on this thread, people are complacent.  They are insisting on calling nutritional medicine "alternative', when it is not.  They keep validating the "lack of evidence" line about orthomolecular medicine's benefits without even researching it for themselves to come to their own conclusions, and overlook the research that orthomolecular doctors have presented and concluded that works.  They keep dismissing me as being one wacko anecdote, when I have told you repeatedly that Hoffer treated over 10,000 people in his career.  Margot Kidder is a high profile adherent to orthomolecular medicine.  She says that Dr. Hoffer was the only one who was able to cure her of her mental illness.  Bill W, the founder of AA said that Dr. Hoffer's B3 saved him. But people keep insisting on saying one anecdote. They keep referring to  Dr. Hoffer, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, Dr. Atkins,  and Dr. Linus Pauling as being quacks, when their professional careers speak volumes for themselves.

No one has ever read a book on orthomolecular medicine, spoken to someone who has recovered from any illness on it, watched a video, nor even tried to grasp the importance of nutrition on health, and on the body's innate ability to heal itself when given the nutritients to do so.

I have presented literature for people interested to read, and videos to go to the library and watch, and resources for you to do a little exploratory investigation of your own.

There is another video called the MARKETING OF MADNESS, put out by the Church of Scientology.  I do not adhere to the Church of Scientology, but it is a video which clearly exposes the nature of the drug companies in trying to get as many people hooked on their drugs as they can.  You can stream it on youtube or google video.

While people remain complacent and lazy, more and more people are falling victim to these drugs and other psychiatric treatments which are abusive and inhumane.

Everyone with a mental illness should be able to read this literature and determine for themselves if they want to go this route.  They should be able to go to their doctor or psychiatrist and say, "I want to try this.  Here is the phone number list of orthomolecular doctors throughout North America.  I want you to phone one of these doctors up and set me up on a program. I want you to continue me with this program until I get better. I also want you to taper me off these drugs you have me on as I get better."

The sad reality is that most doctors will not cooperate and give people a chance.  If they do, it will be to set up the program to fail.

Lastly, we have to STOP thinking of medical doctors as EXPERTS on vitamins and nutrition.  They have 1 hour of formal training in it, and what little they do learn about it is not factual.  That is not expertise.

We have to wake up.  EVERYBODY.  People are getting hurt, and NO ONE is doing anything about it.

Vitamins also need to be government subsidized so that low income people can get well.  Access to proper nutrition should be a god given basic human right.  It is the mainstream medical profession that is depriving people of basic fundamental nutrition to get well.

This is total insanity and no one seems to care. It is very easy to form an opinion about orthomolecular medicine without any real knowledge about it or research into it.  Such a strong opinion on so little thought.

IGNORANCE AND COMPLACENCY KILLS~!

Okay, mod moment here. I feel this is a valuable discussion, which is why its occasional descent into hostility and lack of respect (on all sides of the debate, I might add) is disappointing. Please people, I know you feel passionately about your perspectives, knowledge and experiences, but you need to remain respectful of opposing views.

/mod moment

One of the problems with this debate is that there is no objective definition of mental health.  Another problem is that, as Sineed pointed out, there is a difference between proven-effective pharmas and the administration of care.  Clients of the mental healthcare system who have been abused will naturally associate their experience with the drugs they were treated with, especially if they were prescribed medication that was wrong for them, that made their illness worse.

I've been witness to some shamefully incompetent and uncaring mental healthcare. I've also seen competent and caring treatment. Which had the better outcome? Take a wild guess.

The producers of vitamin/alt therapies and the pharmaceutical industry are both working to control the lion's share of the market.  I'm sure there are caring individuals working with the client/patient in mind in both industries, but each is a business. They exist to make money and want to make more money.  I think proponents of both types of treatment tend to forget that.

Personally, I'm on the side of what has been clinically proven to be effective, but only when there is a mutually respectful partnership between physician and patient in deciding how the treatment will unfold.  IMO, this kind of partnership between psychiatrist and patient is rare. It's more common when the patient is being treated by a GP who has knowledge of mental health issues and their treatment.

In my very subjective opinion, with some exceptions, psychiatrists are arrogant, patronizing assholes who have an incredibly cavalier attitude when it comes to prescribing medication, and have little or no respect for the opinions and experiences of their patients. This attitude, which is sometimes combined with laziness, incompetence, misdiagnosis, over-medication, etc., is what, IMO, drives people to seek alternative treatments.

Rebecca West wrote:

Personally, I'm on the side of

if only you were on the side of safe and respectful discussion spaces for Charter protected topics

Rebecca West wrote:

The producers of vitamin/alt therapies and the pharmaceutical industry are both working to control the lion's share of the market.  I'm sure there are caring individuals working with the client/patient in mind in both industries, but each is a business. They exist to make money and want to make more money.  I think proponents of both types of treatment tend to forget that.

Personally, I'm on the side of what has been clinically proven to be effective, but only when there is a mutually respectful partnership between physician and patient in deciding how the treatment will unfold.  IMO, this kind of partnership between psychiatrist and patient is rare. It's more common when the patient is being treated by a GP who has knowledge of mental health issues and their treatment.

I don't think it is healthy to compare vitamin manufacturers with big pharma.  Vitamin manufacturers are manufacturing non-patented compounds with much reduced mark-ups than big pharma.  Unlike big pharma which try to use their patents to secure total market share for themselves and lobby and advertise to doctors the advantages of their products with fudged data results, vitamin companies simply put their product out for distribution, even in no-name labels, to the pharmacies and health food stores to sell.  There will be some small scale advertising in health food magazines and some on websites, but the comparison between the two is not warranted IMO.

Personally, I'm on the side of what has been clinically proven to be effective. If Dr. Hoffer treated 10,000+ people in his lifetime and had a 2 1/2 yearwaiting list to get in to see him, and he is not the only one, then how can one make the argument that it is not clinically proven, especially when their results have been banned from ever getting published in major journals.  They were banned, not because of poor results, they were banned because his methods were a threat to the establishment. Therefore, lack of published data is not a valid argument.

On the surface, common sense tells us that nutrition has a very large role to play in human health.  Common sense also tells us that if everyone is healthy, then they won't need big pharma. You don't need the doctors either, for that matter.

Goggles Pissano wrote:

Rebecca West wrote:

The producers of vitamin/alt therapies and the pharmaceutical industry are both working to control the lion's share of the market.  I'm sure there are caring individuals working with the client/patient in mind in both industries, but each is a business. They exist to make money and want to make more money.  I think proponents of both types of treatment tend to forget that.

I don't think it is healthy to compare vitamin manufacturers with big pharma.  Vitamin manufacturers are manufacturing non-patented compounds with much reduced mark-ups than big pharma.  Unlike big pharma which try to use their patents to secure total market share for themselves and lobby and advertise to doctors the advantages of their products with fudged data results, vitamin companies simply put their product out for distribution, even in no-name labels, to the pharmacies and health food stores to sell.  There will be some small scale advertising in health food magazines and some on websites, but the comparison between the two is not warranted IMO.

Not to discount Rebecca's other comments, but here I tend to agree. I don't think the comparison is fair, when you look at the anti-competition practices of the pharmaceutical industry, and the un-level playing field. Vitamin manufacturers, if they aren't already owned by the large pharmaceutical companies, are hardly a big player here.  

We hear this argument against other alt med practices and practitioners as well: "oh they're just in it for the money. They're making big bucks off peoples' gullibility." (and actually, I hear this argument about 9/11 skeptic researchers, as well - that they're somehow all making big bucks off 9/11 truth, which is just patently ridiculous. If anything they are out of pocket for their time and costs.)

Anyway, it's an astounding argument coming from those who advocate for the status quo. 

Rebecca West wrote:

Regardless, you saying "you don't need the doctors either" is an incredibly disturbing statement that assumes that you know what is best for others. There's a lot of that attitude in supporters of traditional medicine as well.  It strikes me as a particularly dangerous form of proselytizing as it discourages the individual from questioning and scrutinizing the claims being proposed.

To be fair, this attitude is in abundant evidence on both sides of the argument, as this very thread demonstrates. 

Rebecca West wrote:

It's up to the individual, armed with knowledge .... to decide what is good for them, not some individual who has less of a vested interest in their health than they do.  

Yes.

Rebecca West wrote:

Regardless, you saying "you don't need the doctors either" is an incredibly disturbing statement that assumes that you know what is best for others. There's a lot of that attitude in supporters of traditional medicine as well.  It strikes me as a particularly dangerous form of proselytizing as it discourages the individual from questioning and scrutinizing the claims being proposed.

For that matter, I think we forget just how common death and epidemic used to be. I don't want to discount the significance of the AIDS crisis, especially given its political dimension, but reading up on the 1919 Flu epidemic, or even polio, smallpox, typhus, and malaria, our current freedom from mass death is, in our part of the world at least,  a very recent thing.

A great aunt of mine died as a child from a rusty nail through her foot. My dad almost went the same way, and was only saved by a bread poultice.

For someone to be healthy one day and dead the next was very, very common over a century ago, and I expect it still is that way in some parts of the world

Goggles,

There are toxic levels of some vitamins and minerals. My point though, was that we do need doctors on occasion, no matter how healthy a person might be.

Rebecca West wrote:

So, let me get this straight GP. If, against her neurologist's advice, I took my epileptic daughter off her meds, and instead subjected her to a particular regime (orthomolecular?) of vitamins and minerals, she'd be seizure-free?

OMG NO~!  That is NOT what I am saying.

Dr. Hoffer noticed very early on a link between mental illness and nutritional deficiencies. He found that when he treated people nutritionally, they would get well.  If they were referred to him in his capacity as a psychiatrist for their mental problems, and they had another issue like cancer, MS, high blood pressure, arthritis, parkinson's disease, etc., in many cases, as they improved and eventually got well mentally, their other illnesses which they had would improve as well.  He, as well as other doctors, have observed a nutritional link to certain other severe diseases we often associate as being degenerative and incurable. This does not mean that all diseases are nutritionally based, nor that if some people respond nutritionally that all people with the same disease are going to respond nutritionally.  However, since this has been documented for more than 65 years, perhaps we've lost 65 good years at examining the true nature of some of these diseases that if we had taken Hoffer seriously way back when, there are people who would be well today that are living lives with disease.

About medicating...Dr. Hoffer believes in medicating people for schizophrenia.  However, according to him, these medications cannot get a person completely well.  The medications flat-line people at a level way below normal.  If a person is psychotic, the medications will help to mask those disperceptions.  They can make a person better than they were previously, but they cannot get a person better than that chemical flat-line.

If a healthy person with no mental illness of any kind off the street were administered major tranquillizers, the drugs would make the healthy person sick, because that flat-line level is way below normal. Now, lets assume that RyanW's synopsis is correct that drugs are 54% effective and 85% toxic side effects. 54% would be the flat-line level.  Anything below that 54%, the drugs are effective. They are an improvement on the health of the person.  Any health above that 54% level, the drugs are going to suck the healthy person down to that flat-line level.

For people who are mentally ill, Dr. Hoffer put the people on major tranquillizers.  He also changed their diet and administered vitamins.  Gradually, over time, his patients would improve on the vitamins and change in diet.  Once they reached the flat-line level of 54%, the drugs were no longer providing benefit to the patients because their health was at equillibrium with the drugs.

As the patient exceeded that 54% flat-line equillibrium level, the drugs started to have the opposite effect.  Rather than help the patient, the drugs were sucking the patient down to that 54% flat-line level and were making the patient sick.  Therefore, to counteract this, Dr. Hoffer would start to taper people gradually off the drugs slowly over time. 

By cutting down on the dosage level very gradually over time, he would be setting that flat-line level a little higher so that the patient would be maximizing the benefit of the drugs without making the patient sick.  Once the person was completely well, the drugs were then discontinued as long as the patient remained well.

Mainstream doctors on the other hand, will prescribe the medication. If the patient tries orthomolecular treatments and tries to get well, they will work fine until the patient reaches that flat-line level.  Beyond that, the drugs start making the person sick.  The mainstream doctor or psychiatrist will tell the patient that the drugs are fine, but that the vitamins are toxic and are hurting the patient.  They take the patient off the `toxic` vitamins and the person remains flat-lined for life on the major tranquillizers as proof that schizophrenia is incurable.

I personally don`t believe that there exists a doctor out there who will cooperate to help someone with schizophrenia get well. Dr. Hyla Cass, a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Berkley said to the effect of, in the video, Feed Your Head, ``that only 3 in 100 psychiatrists coming out of universities today have the ability to think beyond medication.``Therefore, if you do find one of the 3% minority of doctors out there, and they are discovered to be helping you to get well, the can be taken to the Board of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and they can be stripped of their licence to practice medicine for using `unorthodox` practices. No one is going to jeopardize their professional careers to try something new.

So my point is, if a person ever finds themselves beyond that equillibrium level, and they are not getting the cooperation from their doctors, they may have to be creative on their own to taper themselves off the medication very very slowly in order to get well.

If you watch the video by Dr. Bonnie Burstow, When Women End UP in those Horrible Places, one woman in particular, escaped.  She fled the medical system and she never looked back.  Many women found that they had to leave the system and never look back, that this was so much better than living within the system.

This is reality.  There are those of us who do not have access to quality health care, nor the right to get well.  We think that we are so sophisticated and advanced, but for some, we are still in the dark ages, with all the inhumanities and indignities that go along with it.

The doctors are not going to change.

the bottom line here was that a couple of people were sitting having a conversation and they were not permitted to do that.

They were not allowed to have that basic human function without someone busting in and making demands of them, without others pointing out individual viewpoints and their unwillingness to normalize. That happened in this thread 

whole threads on Babble get stopped for unintentional word violations, for "hysteria" or "how fat the Israeli PM is"

what happened here is much worse; the words and patronization targeted members some of them perhaps have not before been leaders in a conversation and will take confrontation at a higher cost than someone who's done it for years

arrogant mods are great, they can't see the wood for the trees

I recommend viewers to look again

ryanw wrote:

the words and patronization targeted members some of them perhaps have not before been leaders in a conversation and will take confrontation at a higher cost than someone who's done it for years

I thought this deserved to be highlighted, even though I disagree with your opinion about the moderation.

Just a partial correction.  Re: The Aids thread.

Someone made a remark that Gary Null was bad for speaking out against vaccinations in relation to HIV and AIDS.  I mentioned that a doctor Klenner in the 1940s had been able to successfully treat 60 of 60 cases of poliomyelitis by using super huge amounts of vitamin C, and this was before the polio vaccinations were developed in the mid 50s, suggesting that perhaps the AMA did not serve the public well by ignoring these findings before the mid 50s.  Carrying that over, to HIV and AIDS, then perhaps there are alternatives to try instead of simply relying on vaccinations.  I said this in defence of Gary Null and on some peoples' attacks of his criticism of vaccinations.

I never mentioned it as a cure for AIDS.  It has never been tried.

Timebandit wrote:

 GP first posted in another thread about curing AIDS with megadose vitamins.  

On #15 of the Aids thread, I specifically wrote...

"And please, do not jump to conclusions and assume I suggest that people stop taking their drugs and opt for vitamins instead.  I am merely informing that there are other options and possibilities to explore if people choose to pursue other avenues.

I am also NOT proclaiming that vitamins CURES AIDS. I am suggesting that past findings using very high doses of some vitamins seems to appear very promising if applied to AIDS research."

Just to throw in a complete diversion, when I saw this revived thread my first question was whether this was some scientology thing, given their dogmatic anti-psychiatry stance.

Their museum on the subject is called "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death".

I had almost forgotten until last night that I did have some experience with megavitamins - the scientologists had a relative of mine dosing on them and taking saunas. It was for a non-psychiatric condition, but by the time he got away the only syptoms they removed was a lot of money from his wallet.

Not to take away from GP's experience, or any other area in which this therapy is being tried. As I said, I don't have any personal experience with that. But it is funny that I blanked on my relative's experience.