How to Reform Psychiatry - Explore New Ideas for treating people with mental issues.

jas wrote:

I think, Goggles, if you did not frame your discussion as a general anti-psychiatry thread open to people who want to discuss a number of different alternatives, it might be more true to the actual discussion you are encouraging. If you mainly just want to discuss vitamin therapy, as far as I know, it would be okay for you to start a thread entirely and exclusively on that topic.

I would like people to carefully comb through what I have posted on this thread. I have delved into vitamins for arthritis, but I have not made this into a vitamin thread.  In fact, exactly the opposite.  I mentioned how Dr. Hoffer said that our existing healthcare system is sick.  I have highlighted the lack of experience that psychiatrists have in womens' lives but that they claim expertise and have the power and influence to be experts on womens lives in a court of law.  I have highlighted the non-science behind the psychiatric drugs that psychiatrists give to people.

And despite all these people who are somehow 'experts' on vitamins but who don't take them, and have never read anything about Hoffer or anything orthomolecular, they still feel free to dismiss the work Hoffer did as being non-science, and alternative.  They are still insisting on and redefining my life as being an 'extraordinary claim' implying that my recovery did not happen, and that the one success story of a boy who starved himself to the point where his nervous system completetly shut down and the doctors who were going to leave him paralyzed and I told his mother to bring the vitamins in to the hospital and that got his nervous system up and running again after six weeks, that this is a broad statement that 'VITAMINS CAN CURE ALL PARALYSIS' is absolute rubbish.

The casual 'know it alls' who have never bothered to take the time to actually research anything orthomolecular and the expert 'skeptics' who have read even less are usurping this thread with the hopes of shutting it down again. 

Someone earlier on mentioned that vitamin treatments is just feeding the capitalist system. I would like to add that when a person goes to a grocery store and buys milk, bread, meat, vegetables, and other groceries, that they are feeding the capitalist system.  The purchase and sale of goods is exactly what the capitalist system is about.

I mentioned vitamins simply because they worked for me ON A TOTALLY DIFFERENT THREAD, I might add.  What I find most offensive is that people who are on toxic drugs, drugs which are causing extensive long-term damage, and drugs which do not have a valid scientific basis to their use except that they chemically lobotomize people are given these treatments as the only option available. Safer and more effective alternatives , the ones consistently being shot down by the 'experts' and 'expert skeptics' on this thread and on one other thread previously, and the medical doctors who have not had any real training in them  (I hour in fact) can call themselves experts on vitamins (just like psychiatrists who have had two pages of reading on the emotional lives of women are regarded as 'experts' on womens lives) can and will sabotage people wanting to try these alternatives for themselves.

There is also no accountability for psychiatrists.  They are free and justified by the establishment for using these torture treatments, treatments which have no proper science to justify their use, and the general public is totally indifferent.

Jas included all kinds of information that highlights the cultural bias in diagnosing and treating mental illness.  If any of this was scientifically 'pure' there would not be any cultural differences at all.  Lynn Payer wrote a book called, Disease Mongers. Her book is about medicine in general.  She shows cultural biases in many different areas of medicine and how the 'science' reference to medicine is really a myth. Dr. Michael Rachlis, author of Strong Medicine and Second Opinion has said that medicine is more of an art than it is a science.

I think these armchair big shots had better start to show threads like this a little more respect, if not for themselves, then for those who are seriously concerned about these issues, the ones who have to live with the horrors of existing treatments, and let people work out solutions for themselves without the same ones sabotaging the discussions.

Bacchus wrote:

Steve Jobs died of cancer when perhaps he didnty have to but he delayed treatment for a year using homeopathic rememdies instead

Tb isnt wrong in that

Homeopathy was never addressed in this thread by me.  Cancer has a very high mortality rate.  Mainstream treatments like chemotherapy and radiation have excessively high mortality rates, so your point is what...so it is OK if Steve Jobs died of cancer using conventional therapies...and the alternative is what...what is the point...people die of cancer period.

Bacchus,

I am sorry if I came across as being snarky in post #107. My question mark blew up, and I was making do without.  I had to restart my computer to get it back.

Suzanne Sommers wrote a book called Knockout: Interviews with Doctors who are Curing Cancer and How to Prevent Getting it in the First Place.  In this book she writes the following:

Quote:

"When it was announced on Larry King's show that I had breast cancer, a friend set me up on a phone call with a person involved in the cancer industry, who asked for anonymity and confided in me, saying: 'The truth is, we don't want to find a cure for cancer. It's too big a business.'" p. 29.

The same can be true for mental illness. It is lacking in science, and too many people are making too much money by hurting people.

ECT is Barbaric Cruelty.

Here is a webpage I found which details how ECT, Electro Convulsive Therapy, which is used in alarming numbers as a so called valid treatment for depression causes permanent brain damage...

Electro Convulsive Therapy, A Crime Against Humanity~!

Here is a quote from this article:

Quote:

Advocates of ECT falsely claim there is no evidence of brain damage from ECT.  For example, in his book Overcoming Depression, Dr. Andrew Stanway, a British physician, says "People often worry that ECT might be damaging their brain in some way but there is no evidence of this"  (p.184).

In fact, it didn't take long after ECT was invented in 1938 for autopsy studies revealing ECT-caused brain damage to begin appearing in medical journals.  This brain damage includes cerebral hemorrhages (abnormal bleeding), edema (excessive accumulation of fluid), cortical atrophy (shrinkage of the cerebral cortex, or outer layers of the brain), dilated perivascular spaces in the brain, fibrosis (thickening and scarring), gliosis (growth of abnormal tissue), and rarefied and partially destroyed brain tissue.  (See Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Electroshock: It's Brain Disabling Effects for references.)  Commenting on the extent of physical brain damage caused by electroconvulsive "therapy", Karl Pribram, Ph.D., head of Stanford University's Neuropsychology Laboratory, once said: "I'd rather have a small lobotomy than a series of electroconvulsive shock. ... I just know what the brain looks like after a series of shocks, and it's not very pleasant to look at" (APA Monitor, Sept.-Oct. 1974, pp. 9-10).      

     

Thank you for including your personal testimony of homeopathic treatments.  I am someone who is totally ignorant of homeopathic medicine. So when I hear about someone who has had a positive experience from it when they were not able to get satisfaction from mainstream doctors, it makes me happy to learn how things worked out so well, especially for a little girl.

Yes, I do find it frustrating to read about these ongoing dismissals.  Some people merely voice their opinions, but others have made it a point to to be very adament and to make the very same arguments repeatedly. I was expecting some kind of discourse, but nothing to the extent I have experienced on these two threads.

What I find most frustrating is that I have not been able to connect with people about the importance of vitamins. Some have made statements that they believe that diet and proper nutrition have a very important role in physical and mental health, but vitamins somehow are not included in that formula.

Nutritionists have been able to flourish as a legitimate science for many years, but they have had to cowtow to the dictates of the Canadian Medical Association to have any validity.  Everything they learn in school has been carefully supervised by the CMA, and it has to conform to their objectives.  For Instance, nutritionists follow Canada's Food Rules, where people must consume food from each of the food groups to get their proper RDA's or (required dietary allowances).  They believe that a proper diet gives people their proper nutritional needs, and that vitamins are a waste of money.

Nutritionists and nursing students who take classes in nutrition believe what they learn in school. They believe in the purity of science and that these scientific principles have been meticulously and thoroughly researched , otherwise they would not be included in the textbooks. They somehow cannot get their heads around the reality that factoids and non-science has crept into their textbooks in places and that not all of it is based on pure scientific principles, and that these factoids are causing people real harm.  For instance, most people believe that vitamin C causes kidney stones.  There has been no research anywhere to show this to be true but it can be found in many textbooks, and people will blank face quote this from their textbooks as though it is divine fact.  Vitamin C actually helps to dissolve kidney stones because it is an antioxident, and people who have kidney stones and need to be taking it are not because of this factoid.

Orthomolecular Medicine is different from what nutritionists do.  They feel that there are foods which make people feel unwell.  These foods should be avoided.  Orthomolecular psychiatrists do not overgeneralize, but they have found sugar, grains, and dairy to be the worst culprits.  Eggs, chicken, apples, oranges, red meat, and rice have also causes problems for some people. Everyone is unique, and some people can eat grains and dairy while others cannot.  Grains and dairy are two essential food groups in Canada's Food Rules, and this runs contrary to what nutritionists value as being essential.

The second difference is that orthomolecular doctors know that nutritional deficiencies have a direct link to ill health, and that when someone is ill, food alone will not fill the void.  Vitamins are essential for achieving and maintaining proper health.  The more serious the illness the more essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids become to restoring health, and the higher the dosage levels need to be prescribed.  These dosage levels far exceed the RDA's.  Vitamins are the key ingredients missing.

The third difference is that orthomolecular medicine does not recognize RDA's.  Nutritional needs are not set in RDA levels but are defined by the health and uniqueness of every individual person. These needs are arbitrary and will vary from person to person.

Both nutritionists (dietitians) and orthomolecular doctors believe that junk food is bad and that people need to change their diets to turn around their health. Nutritionists believe that diet alone is all that is required, whereas orthomolecular doctors supplement diets with the proper levels of vitamins as well. Nutritionists like all the food groups.  Orthomolecular doctors support people eating foods which are nutritious and healthy and foods which do not make people sick, and that could include eliminating entire food group categories.

So when people make these blanket statements that vitamins are a waste of money, they are merely reciting mainstream medicines' orthodoxy, and quite possibly what they learned themselves in college or university.

I just wish that people would be able to take a step backwards for a minute and try to think outside the box.  The mainstream orthodoxy did not get it all right, and they do not base everything on pure science either.  If every medical doctor, nurse, or nutritionist started questioning everything they learned in textbooks as they were learning, first of all, they would not be able to graduate. They would not have time to actually absorb the material they paid good money to learn because they would be too busy digging into primary source referencing looking for the proof of every scientific conclusion.

Secondly, their brains would explode. All this contradictory information would boggle the mind because there is so much controvery behind so many medical positions that the brain simply could not sort through all the chaos.

Very little in medical science is all black and white, and we have to stop acting like it is.

Sineed wrote:

And yes; orthomolecular medicine has also been discredited. 

If one believes that fraudulent methodology is valid, then and only then can one make that claim.

If an original study shows that taking 1000 mg of vitamin C a day for 6 months can reduce colds by 50%, and the repeat study uses instead only 60 mg of vitamin C a day for three weeks and then claim that the orginal finding was invalid, then one cannot in good conscience make any such claim, yet people do. The repeat study amounts to a 94% reduction in the daily dosage for an 87.5% reduction in the duration the study was carried out.

Repeat studies debunking orthomolecular claims are set up to fail.

Orthomolecular medicine has never been legitamately discredited. Sorry~!

I looked up on Dr. Abram Hoffer's son, and he is a professor of Internal Medicine at McGill University.  His bio is included below...

John L. Hoffer

Here is a website showing Dr. L. Hoffer receiving an award for his contributions to nutritional medical research...

(edit)

It is so comforting to know that McGill University, the Jewish General Hospital, Brandeis University, MIT, and Harvard University have all lowered their academic requirements and scientific standards to allow such a medical infidel to study at their schools of medicine, to teach university medical students and to perform advanced medical research on nutrition.

(edit)

Oh yes, this award was given by the Canadian Nutrition Society.

This is what happens when you let giant cartels: big agra like herbicide and pesticide producers, genetically modified food producers, and big pharma tell you how to think.

It has never been the publics' interest to refer to vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids as toxic and poisonous.  These are molecular structures that were created by the universe before people ever walked the earth and were deemed good and essential for life.  Now, they are legally labelled as toxic poisons. 

The real toxic poisons on the other hand, the herbicides, the pesticides, the genetically modified food, the animal growth hormones, and the prescription drugs like thalidomide, voix, chlorpromazine, haldol, prozac, zoloft are deemed to be healthy and essential for good health.

Orthomolecular medicine has always claimed that vitamins are cheaper, safer, and more effective than patented pharmaceutical drugs.  I believe that this is why the major cartels are using these international laws to ban the products because they pose a massive threat to their profits.

The third website on the previous post stated that the Codex Alimentarius Laws are going to permanently destroy ancient ways of healing from other cultures.

Garlic is going to be classified as a toxic drug.  Bad breath is going to be illegal from now on. No more peppermint either.  That too is toxic, unless it is found in a patented pharmaceutical product with a heavily marked up price.

For people who like to confuse Orthomolecular Medicine with "alternative" medicines, here is a link below from the International Society of Orthomolecular Medicine which discusses the confusion.

ISOM and Alternative Medicine

Here is a chunk from this website which highlights the differences...

Quote:

"Orthomolecular, on the other hand, because it is identified with Linus Pauling, our greatest living scientist, and because it rests on vast body of research in the basic and clinical sciences, does force a major revision in medical thinking. Nutrition, which has been the stepchild of medicine and generally considered a dead issue in medicine, suddenly is at the crux of this new medical movement. No wonder then, that Orthomolecular became a buzzword to the medical establishment, who saw it only as megavitamins and judged it as quackery.

By contrast, the word, Holistic became the subject of numerous symposia, journal articles, welcomed by editors eager to promote the image of modern medicine as a progressive and responsive institution. But as it gained supporters, Holistic Medicine also gained additional theories and practices, some of dubious value, some downright unscientific, Even the most broad-minded and liberal-minded editor had to recoil from permitting such things as psychic healing and kinesiology within the pages of a refereed journal. Soon the word "Alternative, came to replace Holistic in the medical journals. Now the establishment could pick and choose individually between the various therapies that had gathered under the holistic umbrella; nutrition, biofeedback, chiropractic, acupuncture, herbalism, homeopathy, massage, hypnosis, iridology, kinesiology, astrology, psychic healing and other intuitive therapies, to name a few.

The orthomolecular movement was faltered with identity confusion and, in fact, many of our own members seem to have chosen Holistic as their preferred badge-word. This is good for the short run, I agree: it is attractive to patients and profitable while being non-controversial and safer professionally as well. In the long run, however, I think Holistic Medicine has no future. It has already lost its identity, except as a clearing house for medical novelty.  Most important, because it does not identify strongly with science it has lost reliability.

Meantime, Orthomolecular Medicine retains scientific reason for being: its basic science foundations of nutrition, biochemistry and clinical nutrition have grown at a prodigious rate. Megavitamin niacin therapy, which was considered dangerous and controversial in treating schizophrenia, is now the standard of care in the hyperlipidemias. What began as megavitamin therapy now employs a broad data base and a variety of therapies applicable to numerous medical and psychiatric conditions. It is ironic that this positive growth of orthomolecular science and therapy has actually clouded the identity of the Orthomolecular movement. On the one hand we are confused with Holistic Medicine; on the other we are seen only as the avant garde of orthodox medicine In hopes of defining our true identity let me update the concept of Orthomolecular Medicine as anew medical specialty..."

From the ISOM Website.

Timebandit wrote:

Tell you what - Find corroboration for their claims from a website that *doesn't* have a direct relationship to or is in the business of further "orthomolecular" and we can talk.  Everything you post is from ortho-whatever.com.  You are only picking sources that have a vested interest in furthering this idea.

Who else besides someone who is an orthomolecular medical doctor, someone tied to the original studies, would examine the fine details of the repeat studies?  The real problem is that most people don't do that.  You were told to do this in the last thread, but you didn't go out and find out for yourself.

Students from all professions blindly trust what they read from their textbooks in university thinking that all angles were meticulously covered to reach these conclusions. Sadly and unfortunately, mainstream medical research is more politically and corporate driven than scientific. Profit motives are more the desired outcome rather than scientific purity and optimal human health.

A case in point: natural dessicated thyroid hormone treatment vs. patented synthetic tyroid hormone treatments.  In the website, Stop the Thyroid Madness, people claim that they felt better on natural thyroid hormones but were forced to switch to patented synthetic products instead.  They have never felt well since.  They also feel that the patented blood tests do not properly measure thyroid functioning, therefore, they feel that they are not being treated properly with proper hormone levels.

http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/

To reference post #24, I include the work of Dr. Bonnie Burstow who wrote in her book, Radical Feminist Therapy that chlorpromazine had abolutely no science to back up its use other than it sedated patients.  The maker of chlorpromazine and the psychiatrists lobbied the US government to give psychiatrists sole jurisdiction over its distribution to patients.  This is political lobbying and corporate greed; not science.

Here is a youtube video conference with psychologists and nurses discussing Electro Convulsive Therapy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95aJ48kF81M

Sineed wrote:

Since the treatment being administered does not work, she must have had a self-limiting condition that improved without treatment.

That is not the story you were told.  Therefore you should not fantasize things in your head like that.  Unless you know the child personally, you are way out of scope in making such conclusions, expecially without the expertise backing you up to do so.

Sineed wrote:

1. Self-limiting illness;

2. Placebo effects;

3. Confirmation bias - people convince themselves a treatment was effective when it was not;

4. Regression to the mean - people with chronic diseases that have relapsing and remitting courses might take something when their disorder is severe, and it improves not because the treatment worked, but because the disease regressed back to its usual degree of severity. Sometimes it's a problem in medical research.

You are talking way out of your scope here.  I have personally experienced a full recovery.  I have witnessed others who have had a total and complete recovery for so called incurable degenerative diseases, and you cannot redifine so many peoples' lives like that.  Shame on you.

Sineed wrote:

There should be a special circle of hell for people who sell expensive, ineffective remedies to desperate people.

That is why I have put up an anti-psychiatry thread.  That is exactly what many feel about psychiatry.  Thank you for validating so many peoples' lives with truth, finally~!

ennir wrote:

"This is an anti-psychiatry thread for people who have been hurt by the mainstream system to voice their concerns and to seek out alternative solutions to help them improve their health.  Treatment options like nutrition, and vitamins, yoga, meditation, etc. are welcome to be discussed."

Thanks GP.

I discovered at a young age that it is very easy to lock people up who are acting out, the why of the acting out seems not important, the medications for the acting out are important and they have side effects.   IMV it is not about the health of our society, it is about the control of our society. 

I think that Ennir has summed it up the best of anyone on this thread.

What I liked about Dr. John Breeding's videos I posted above is that he says pretty much the same thing.  He says that when people talk about mental illness as being biochemical or genetic, it places the blame on the individual and drugs are the treatment for biomedical problems.  This way, people don't have to face issues like violence in the home or in school or people not wanting to conform to societal norms.  Mental illness does not become an issue of distress to societal problems which need to be addressed like racisim, sexism, homophobia, etc.,  but rather are personal bio-chemical imbalances in need of direct chemical intervention.