Bonnie Kaplan interview
Dr. Jim Rick's radio show.
Victoria, B.C.
December 19, 2001
After some romantic blues music is playing in the background, Dr. Ricks comes on:
JR - Well everybody gets the blues, don't they. But when the blues turn into depression it's another story. It's not romantic, it's debilitating and it effects a lot of us. Recently there's been an interesting discovery about a nutritional supplement that's been shown to reduce depression in people diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The research is taking place at the faculty of medicine at the University of Calgary and is led by Dr. Bonnie Kaplan, a psychologist. What's interesting about this is that it was first used in a kind of pig feed. Is that right Dr. Kaplan?
BK - Well it wasn't so much that it was used that way however
it was based on knowledge of animal nutrition, yes.
JR - Noted that it was originally compounded to treat
behavioural problems and mood changes in pigs. Even though I grew up with pigs
I'm not sure how you tell what their moods are.
BK - Oh, you can. Well, you can tell something about
irritability. Have you ever seen irritability in pigs on a farm? What they did
- apparently do on farms is if they do not want to kill the pigs, send them off
for sacrifice yet - they actually very
often use a broad spectrum mineral based nutritional mush that is applied to
the feed. David Hardy who had owned an animal nutrition feed company for 20
years knows a lot about animal nutrition. That is how irritability and
aggression were often treated in farm animals - pigs and other animals. And so they
decided that maybe there would be some bit of wisdom to be applied to humans
and help Tony Stephan with his children who are not of the animal kingdom but
the human animal kingdom.
JR - Treated the kids first right?
BK - Well, it wasn't the nutritional supplements that we are
studying now. But they did use the knowledge that came from farmyard animals.
You know this is not that unusual. We are used to a lot of human health related things being tested on lab
animals but what we are not is some insight coming from farm animals.
JR - Similarity between pigs and humans in terms of
physiology?
BK - Right. Right, now I am not a gastroenterologist but my GI
friends tell me that pigs are in fact the animal model of choice for anything
involving the gastrointestinal tract and a lot of metabolic disorders, etc that
we are actually quite similar so there is a lot of wisdom behind applying
what's known about these particular farm animals to we human non farm animals.
And that's where the idea came from. The supplement has evolved.
JR - Were you skeptical when you first heard?
BK - Oh, yes totally. Actually I wouldn't even meet with these
guys when I first heard about it. And they were not using animal nutrients and
that's important for your audience to know. I had a funny phone call from a
family that had called every veterinary supply house in Canada trying to find
the pig pills. There are no pig pills. What these guys did, David Hardy and
Tony Stephan, is that they went about putting together a human supplement based
upon David's knowledge of animal nutrition. And then after they were able to
help Tony's children so much they realized that they were on to something and
they knew that they had a choice to make. They could either got out and try to make
a lot of money selling the stuff or they could try to really change the way we
view mental illness. In order to change the way we view mental illness, they
knew they had to approach academics to try to get some scientists interested in
the studies. That's what they've done.
JR - Is this similar to the thinking of Abram Hoffer?
BK - Absolutely. Dr. Hoffer is a giant in the field. The step
forward that Tony and David took beyond what Dr. Hoffer has done and there are
many other people like Dr. Hoffer is that they didn't have the kind of
constraints that we all have in the scientific and medical world that you just
want to play with one ingredient at one time or maybe one or two ingredients. I
think that Dr. Hoffer uses several but with a major emphasis on one. They
didn't have that bias and probably our brains don't have that bias and our
brains don't know that you are supposed to change one variable at a time. And
so what Tony and David did was they introduced a broad spectrum of ingredients
and the way the supplements have involved right now there are actually 36
ingredients in it.
JR - Now, this is the supplement that you actually studied in your
research. Right?
BK - That's right.
JR - Tell us a little bit about that. Just describe the researh so we can get a picture of what you've done.
BK - Oh sure. Research follows an orderly progression. When
you have a novel intervention you do case studies, you do development work and
then when you think you know what you are doing, you do what are called open
label case series. That means everybody knows what what they're getting but you study them systematically.
All of that is still preliminary in the scientific world.
After you have had open label case series and you have a promising intervention
you go on to what are called randomized control trials. What we have just done
is started to publish our preliminary data consisting of, well eventually I
think there will be even three articles, but right now the first one has come
out and it is involving open label case series in adults with bipolar disorder
JR - How many did you study?
BK - Well that is an interesting thing. That particular manuscript
has only 14 people in it and in fact 3 dropped out so only 11 finished. A lot
of people think that means it's not interesting. But I need to maybe educate
your listeners if you will let me as to the concept of effect size and why we
stopped at 11, and we are not going to do anymore than 11. The reason has to do
with the magnitude of the effect. When you have something where everyone gets
better.
JR - I will believe you Bonnie. I did not do well in statistics in
school so I will assume that eleven is enough.
BK - It is plenty. Don't waste your research.
JR - What did you find?
BK - Well we found a 50-60% improvement in symptoms and a 50%
decrease in the need for psychiatric medication. That is called a "large effect
size". So, that was pretty powerful. It's not magic but it was pretty powerful. So, from there we are moving on to randomized control trials.
JR - What did you tell these guys they were getting?
BK - In the open case series they knew exactly what they were
getting. In fact they had the entire ingredient list.
JR - So what you are saying, we next go to the place where some people get the placebo, the stuff that doesn't supposedly work, but of course it always does. Placebo effects are pretty good. As a matter of fact we could bottle placebo effects we could do a lot of non-invasive treatment. But, in any event that's the next step. Now you've told me before we got on the air today that there's been a lot of public response to this research, that a lot of people have called you up. What's that been like?
BK - Well, actually I appreciate your bringing that up because
people should not call me. I can't help the public. We're very separate. The
researchers at the university are academic researchers and we need to just do
our research. We can't help people clinically. If people want to know about the
supplement they should call the company and we're 12 arms lengths away from the
company. We work with them obviously.
JR - And who is the company?
BK - The company are the people who I mentioned the Synergy
Group of Canada and they run what's called the Truehope Institute and they have
a website which is, may I give the website?
JR - Sure.
K It's www.truehope just
the way it sounds t-r-u-e-h-o-p-e dot com and in fact their toll free number is
also truehope it is 1 triple 8 truehope. So we researchers, we don't get any
money for the sale of the product, we're not promoting this product and we're
not really tied in with the company. That's really important.
JR - What's been the reaction from people in psychology community, the other psychologists?
BK - I'm getting some and of course the internet changes
everything but we are getting some really interesting responses from all over
the world. I just got an e-mail, oh I guess dozens of e-mails everyday, but I
just was reading one before you called about a physician down in the States who himself has depression and
has managed it with a multi multi ingredient approach and is very interested in
this.
JR - So you are flushing out people who might have
independently stumbled on to this?
BK - Oh yes, and also potential collaborators for research all
over North America.
JR - Say about Bonnie – she very gracious in giving her time
and own dedication not about research but about helping people and I appreciate
that. So, what is in the future. Understand you have a half million dollars to
continue the research.
BK - We actually have more than that but that is money is not
my problem but there are many other obstacles to doing research. What we are
doing right now is a randomized control trial here in Alberta and we actually
have a couple of other trials funded but there are a lot of details to work out
yet so I'd rather not go into detail about that if you don't mind.
JR - End result of this?
BK - I'd like to say
sometimes I'm studying this particular supplement called EM Power but I'm not
really studying EM Power. What I find really exciting at this point in my
career is that I am studying a new approach , a new way of thinking about mental
disorders. And if you are a psychologist, what could be more interesting than
that? Where is it going? I don't know. I mean a lot of people don't think it is
going to pan out after the placebo controlled trials. We've seen so many positive
results that I don't know. I have a feeling that we're going to be continuing
this program of research for many years. You know, I am a scientist. I am going
to wait to see what the results really show.
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