TRANCRIPT OF PRESENTATION BY DAVID GILBERT OF SYNERGY TO THE
MOOD DISORDERS GROUP IN HAMILTON, ONT ON APRIL 10, 2001 AND TAPED BY DR. TERRY
POLEVOY AND MARVIN ROSS
Meeting began with a video clip of Dr. Bonnie Kaplan being
interviewed on the Canadian Discovery Channel.
Moderator:
Our speaker tonight is David E Gilbert who is a research
assistant with the Synergy Group of Canada. Now they deal with methods of
dealing with what I call mood disorders . .. And his topic tonight is the
breakthroughs that they have recently made and the continuing research that
goes on in this particular field.
Gilbert:
Fortunately I am no longer suffering from panic disorder
because when I volunteer to do these lectures in various cities I never know
what I am going to find and I never know what equipment is going to work. So,
if somebody to catch the lights (mumbled about problems reading without
glasses).
. .Calgary Alberta Children 's Hospital she is the coordinator
and the one who is responsible for the research going on at different
universities (Bonnie Kaplan whispered into tape by Polevoy) . At this point we
have seven universities involved.
A video of an interview from TV with Kaplan was shown about
how the supplement seems to correct some sort of imbalance that people have.
Kaplan: “It is not possible to take this supplement and get
better unless you are decreasing some psychotropic medications and that
requires a physician usually to be involved as it is very complicated for
individual patients.”
Question: “So you shouldn't just go out and start popping
nutritional supplements on their own.
Kaplan: Well you can't actually buy this over the counter
because the people the people who have manufactured it are very concerned about
harm coming to individuals who might start popping these on top of their
psychotropic medications. They are behaving very responsibly in that regard.
End of video clip.
Gilbert: I should explain that my being here is very
personal. From the time I was very young I suffered from what is now called
dysthemia. I was always depressed. Then 15 years ago I had some rather
devastating personal issues in my life which triggered me from dysthimia with
periodic suicidal bouts into panic attacks as well. There is often a family
history of these as my mother is schizophrenic- fortunately only mildly schizophrenic but even mildly is
interesting growing up with
My grandfather on my mother 's side was an alcoholic and a
high percentage of those people are self medicating. They are bipolars,
schizophrenics. I lost an aunt because of it on my father 's side. By 17 or
171/2 he started developing sleep problems (son?). I have always had terrible
sleep problems as had my sister. They would trigger the cyclic depressions and
would become suicidal. I didn't realize how bad they were till he came into my
room one night and said ‘dad I think I need some help '
What 's the matter and he said ‘I have no emotions. I 've gone
dead inside. Something 's wrong '.
Well after what I 've gone through having had friends come
and stay with me periodically through my life so that I would not kill myself.
Not that I wanted to die but because it felt like an outside force was trying
to force me to die. I immediately called the school psychologist and I called
his doctor and I called the counselor and we went to see all three of them and
he went through three different rounds of medication and things got worse and
worse and worse. And finally he came to run the audiovisual system at the first
lecture that was given in Eastern Canada when the open case study was just
starting. Before that it was all confidential because it was far too premature.
You simply can't start dropping bombshells without major data to back it up.
He came home and he started going on the website and said
“dad this sounds an awful lot like me. Is there any way I can get on the
study? '
It wasn't till after they published and he wrote an open
letter to other teenagers that I found out how severe his depressions had been.
I knew they were bad because my kid wasn't a mean depressive He didn't get
surly. He tried to be polite but when you were talking to him his face would be
so stiff. He couldn't talk clearly. His responses would be heh heh. It sounded
like his face was frozen. We found out after he had recovered that he slept at
night curled up in his closet . .writing good bye letters to his friends.
. ..the inability to sleep wore him down. My sister 's panic
disorder and her mild bipolar are now gone. My anxiety disorder and depression
are now gone. When you see your sister get well that 's fascinating but when you
get well, and you see your son come back from the brink of suicide there 's no
words for that. So I don't care whether or not ... if anybody goes to their
doctor and makes arrangements to go on the open case study. I care that they
know this is in the pipe. If they want to get into the study program we can
make the arrangements as long as there are no contraindications for it. If they
want to wait till it goes to open market that 's fine too.
But there is one word I want you to take away tonight “don't
give up and slip away”.
We lose 32000 people every year in North America to suicide
and this is unacceptable.
Don't give up.
. .to go back to the beginning you may have heard something
about a hog supplement. It wasn't actually a hog supplement that they used but
when Tony Stephan lost his wife to bipolar suicide and when he lost his father
in law eight years earlier to bipolar suicide 4 of his 10 children were bipolar
– 2 of them were bipolar shizoaffective with rapid cycle 1. One of them was
violent enough that they were seriously thinking of institutionalizing him
because the younger children were frightened. He was 6 foot 1, 15 years old 210
pounds. When he became manic that literally had to wrestle him to the floor, pry
open his jaws and pour the lithium in and hold him there till things would
start to settle out.
For his daughter, legally she couldn't be left on her own.
She had to be on a 24 hour suicide watch in order to be out of the hospital and
she could not be legally left alone with the baby because when she was manic
she was violent and when she was depressed she was virtually comatose.
Tony married his wife 's best friend 8 months after she died
and he warned her you understand you are marrying into an insane asylum –
literally . ...
So he wound up going back to work and as he became friends
with a co-worker he got talking about his personal situation and of course as
you can imagine as a parent he tried every psychotherapeutic medication known
to mankind. He tried acupuncture, acupressure, megavitamins, herbals, magnetic
mattresses on the beds, magnetic hats with flaps over the ears. Anything that
could possibly keep him from losing any more ?
David Hardy was a retired hog food supplement specialist and
a biochemist. He said you know this sounds an awful lot like what we see in the
hog runs (?). The hogs become hyper irritable and its called ear and tail
biting syndrome. They savage each other and for some years now we have always
gotten control of this by giving them highly bioavailable broad spectrum trace
elements. The hogs aren't human but they are the closest thing to humans
biochemically on this earth. And what else do you have to lose.
To make a long story short, Tony Stephan 's son went symptom
free in January 1996. He started on symptom free shortly after that. The
research began from then and the researchers who took it on from various
universities will go into later. But now to take a look with the situation that
we are currently living with. In the USA today from 1999, schizophrenia no
cure, no solutions, people living in agony inside their heads. People living in
the street. It 's a tough condition to live with.
The costs are staggering. It 's the number two health care
cost in North America right behind cardiovascular disease. And it will be
number one within 2 years. This shows the hospital admission rate for mental
health in Canada 1983-1994. You have to understand that this was the same
period that the hospitals were being closed down and that people were being put
in the street. From 1983 we went from about 11 million admissions that was per
year to up to 15 million 11 years later.
Watch what happens in the US where they were not closing
hospitals and accessibility to medical care is pretty much ?. In a three year
period from 1990 to 1993, they had gone from 1.3 million outpatient visits a
year to 3 years later almost 12 million. That 's just not increased diagnosis.
Things did not change that much over a 3year period. Ritalin production. Every
teachers favourite. ADHD kids. 1990-1993 the same 3 year period 1800 kg, 3
years later almost 5000 kg of Ritalin given to our children.
The only reason that you see a leveling off in 1996/97 is
other medications which have similar biochemical effects to Ritalin have come
on the market and started to take market share but the actual overall use is
still showing this meteoric rise. We see the same explosion in autism, in
irritable bowel disease, and here this is the is the Canadian experience
looking at psychotherapeutics because it doesn't matter if you are in the
hospital or not.
In a 4 year period we 've gone from 1.5 million
psychotherapeutic prescriptions to 2.5 million in 4 years. It is epidemic. If
this were AIDs there would be rioting in the streets. Here in Ontario its no
better. There has been a 15% increase in the cost of treating central nervous
system conditions per year. . . . .. But it 's a silent killer. People either
figure everyone else is the same as I am but if you 've only got one experience and
that 's the one inside your head, everybody else is putting up with the same
thing I am nobody else is complaining so I better not either. That 's what I
did. Nobody else is living like I am so I better not say anything. So people
with panic attacks have got all kinds of coping skills to try and live normal
while they 're in terror with their lives.
I used to have agonizing bowel cramps and this is quite
common for these conditions. So severe that I used to seriously consider this
one of the passing thoughts was how hard to you have to hit yourself on the
head to knock yourself out without having to do it twice and killing yourself?
Now that I have teenage kids and my son particularly is
talking to other kids about his experiences, all of a sudden all these other
kids are saying well yeh that 's the way I 'm feeling. That 's what I 'm going
through. I can't . . . ...either. My stomach is always constantly tied up in knots.
I 'm so depressed I want to end it. When we look at a study done by the World
Health Organization ...at university, shows the same thing. Worldwide, in
developed economies. That 's the United States, Canada, the European union.
Mental health considerations are the number 2 of health care costs in the world
and will be number one shortly.
The US surgeon general 's report paints a really grim
picture. Almost 1/5 of children ages 9 to 17 have diagnosable mental or
addictive disorders associated with a ? impairment. A high percentage of the
kids who are substance abusers are trying to stop their racing thoughts. We
have two people. One was a bipolar schizoaffective disorder with mixed states
also suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and severe panic disorder. She
used to be terrified of going to her bathroom often as she could see the demons
there. She didn't just think the demons were there because she knew the demons
were there because she could bloody well see them . . . . . . . . ..
Another man was a rapid cycle bipolar who was in crisis and
was given 24 hour suicide watch. This was before the open case study program
was started before we knew anything about it. Well 24 hour suicide watch can
tell the doctor to get enough medications into him to get him stabilized. He
actually wound up to be the first person in Eastern Canada to go on the open case
study program. But they both say the same things. We started out as alcoholics
to try and deaden the pain. And then we tried cocaine. We tried cocaine and as
one of them said the racing ? finally stopped. They felt so good that they
jumped in with both feet and they stayed there till there was nothing left.
They 're both now clean and sober and they 're both now off
their meds and the girl who suffers such horrifying agoraphobia and panic
disorder actually stood up in front of some 250 people in St Catherines earlier
this year and talked about her story. That 's a long way from cowering in your
bedroom in your bedroom. She 's just gone to Ireland. She 's made arrangements
with customs in Ireland to make sure she can get the supplements. She 's gone
over there, she 's got a job, and she is on her way to having a normal life. Her
psychiatrist said congratulations this is the first major decision I 've seen
you make that wasn't manic driven.
Now this isn't a magic bullet .because it doesn't correct
the underlying genetic situation. If a person with bipolar or bipolar
schizoaffective disorder or depression or anxiety (in the case of depression
anxiety its not always genetic but it often is) these people go off their
medication or the supplement either way they get the same end result They wind
up crashing. And the supplements its very very important to realize we do have
one woman who got her life back so she got her first full time job of her life,
things were going well Her husband was finally relaxing and she started working
double shifts. And she started forgetting to take her supplement. She forgot it
often enough that she started getting the first symptoms of bipolar coming back
but the first symptoms coming back were a feel good hypomania.
She thought hey I am superwoman. I can do anything. I don't
need these pills anymore. And she wound up crashing. She 's working her way back
now so its really really important for people to understand that biochemically
you still got bibolar, you still got depression if its biochemically based. I
left for Toronto last summer and I forgot to take my supplement with me. My
mother was running out so I wasn't about to take any of hers because she 's
schizophrenic and by the time I got back to Ottawa the quacking in the chest
had started again and my ? went down like this (USES SLOW DEEP VOICE TO
ILLUSTRATE POINT).
I won't do it again. I double checked before I left this
morning. It 's only two days but I really really I lived that life for many
years. I didn't want to go back
Now if you look at the adult situation, its just as grim.
19% of the adult US population have a mental disorder and its growing every
year and its 3% on top of that have both mental and addictive disorders.
Basically a fifth of the population adults and children. That 's horrifying.
There is a mass psychic cry of agony going on through the world these days. And
everybody just tries to get by day by day. Don't get me wrong. I 'm not knocking
the psychotherapeutic industry because they 've kept a whole lot of people alive
for a long time.
To look at the cost, in 1996 the direct treatment of mental
disorders, substance abuse and Alzheimer 's reached $99 billion. Direct costs
for mental disorders alone was $69 billion. In 1990,indirect costs $79 million
But look at 2000. $200 million and those dollars have nothing to do with the
families that are torn apart because the children or husband or wife have
mental illness. And now they can't live with it anymore. It doesn't account for
the woman who called me up in tears, she is several months pregnant and she has
been sleeping with a fire extinguisher beside her bed because her husband
violently bipolar and she was afraid that when he was manic he would try to
kill her in her sleep and that was the only thing that she could think of to
try to prevent herself and the unborn baby. The human cost of that $200 million
is staggering.
It costs in ways that people don't think of. If you suffer
depression in your whole life, you think you are somebody who is pretty
worthless, you 're going to marry someone who agrees with you. It 's not a great
recipe for a happy marriage. It 's a great recipe for divorce and the kids pay
for it. The costs of these go on and on and on.
Here we have a chart that shows a happy little place that
the majority of the population in theory lives in. Where people with bipolar,
manic depression, they bounce back and forth from the depression to one degree
or other of mania. Sometimes it 's a feel good hypomania and they feel great but
its rough on everybody else. We 've got people who 've gone through $60,000 in a
month during a manic episode. And for those who go even further they go past
the mania to into a severe mania which is just sick feels horrible and you
can't get down.
People who suffer from panic disorder such as myself or as I
used to comes out of nowhere. You 'll be driving down the road and all of a
sudden boom just feel like the world 's ending, hearts pounding feel like you
can't breathe. You wake up in the middle of the night with this conundrum of feeling
– dread, it seems there is a great sword hanging above you that 's going to drop
at any second and you know its going to drop. You feel betrayed by your body
because you know its just a panic attack but for any of you who have ever had a
panic attack you know there is just no thing as just a panic attack.
The interesting thing is that the opposite of panic disorder
is the criminal mind (?). And that 's where people have (?)
We 've got a man who
suffered from Tourette 's Syndrome who told us after he recovered. If someone
had told me that my kids were run over by a steamroller it wouldn't matter.
Absolutely nothing ? I would trash people places and things without ever
thinking that it had any influence on anybody else. I didn't even feel my own
emotions. I was totally dead inside. Some months after he had recovered, his 10
year old daughter called the research assistant who had been working with him.
It wasn't myself and asked her is my daddy still going to be able to get this.
Because for the first time in her memory, her father was relating to her. He 'd
come home and he was lucky, he was a functioning Tourette 's. He was able to
work mind you when you 've got Tourette 's Syndrome its pretty hard to hide that
– a hard eye blink and a ticking head or the vocal outburst but he used to be
able to make a living. But he had never been there as a father for his
children.
Well why are we seeing such a staggering increase in all of
these conditions? Autism has gone up a thousand percent. I think it was over a
7 year period according to the ? quarterly. There are a couple of clues.
According to the world earth summit we 're running about 85% depletion in soils
in North America. The British department (?) of Agriculture also did a chemical
assay of 20 raw fruits and vegetables and compared to the chemical assay that
had been done 50 years previously. Unfortunately there were only 5 elements
because that is all they had assayed 50 years previously but they found their
deficiencies ranged upwards to 81%.
Johns Hopkins University also did a fascinating study. They
took 55 frequent attender patients from the gastroenterology clinic. People
with chronic gastric problems at random from 650 odd. They found that 92% of
them suffered from clinical depression and a substantial minority of them
suffered from anxiety disorder. What we 've been finding as we 're following people with the various conditions that
we 're researching, is that a very high percentage of them suffer from irritable
bowel disease, multiple food sensitivities, constipation, diarrhea,
hypertension which is high blood pressure, asthma, and migraine headaches. And
we 're finding in a high percentage of people we 're working with , we 're now
formally tracking it, it appears that when the body drops below certain critical
thresholds of any one of the precursors, the building blocks of the
neurotransmitters and the ? enzymes, the body goes into other metabolic
pathways. Sometimes people are triggered into it by a severe psychological or
physiological stressor and once those people normalize then they can taper down
and their fine. Other people have a genetic inability to do it efficiently and
all it takes is being triggered into it and it is a long way back.
One of the reasons we 're seeing sort of corollary damage is
that they used to run an organic teaching farm integrating pest management
biological mechanical controls. And when you add herbicides for ? as nitrogen
to the soil you cause the soil bacteria that is responsible for breaking the
soil down into structures that the plants can absorb you either . . so first of
all your not adding anything accept nitrogen phosphorus and potassium to the
soil because that 's where you get the big bang for your buck. And second what
is left in the soil, the soil ? are no longer able to take it out. And of
course nobody is really worried about it too much cause corn doesn't suffer
from ADHD. ?It doesn't kick up much of a fuss.
Well, David Hardy and Tony Stephan said how is it that we
found this – a power engineer and a retired hog feed supplement specialist.
Well, come on, We 're not Albert Schweitzer or Albert Einstein. How come nobody
else found out. So they went on the internet to something called pubmed which is not a resort for doctors but it is
a resource for medical abstracts.
They did a bit of a literature search and found out that for
20 years things had been pointing in the same direction. Trace elements this is
in 1984 from Johns Hopkins. Trace elements play an active role in various
metabolic processes of the body. Current evidence suggests that a disturbance
in the concentration of trace elements can produce various psychiatric
symptomology. Zinc. There are over 600 metabolite enzymes in the human body
that are mediated by zinc alone let alone all the rest of the precursors.
Zinc plays an important role in the axonal and synaptic
transmission. Hyperactive children may be deficient in zinc and vitamin B6.
Alcoholism, schizophrenia, Wilson 's and picks disease are brain disorders
dynamically related to zinc processes. ??? Again looking at zinc and people
with depression, zinc deficiency impairs neuro and immune activity of the
mammalian organism. Again with zinc looking at 48 immuno-suppressed subjects,
looking at serum levels 32 normal
volunteers serum zinc levels were significantly lower in major depressed
subjects than in normal controls. There was significant negative correlations
between serum zinc and severity of depression. The lower the level of zinc, the
worse the depression.
Looking at schizophrenia, cerebral spinal fluid 1979
American Journal of Psychiatry the authors measure copper levels in CSF in 8
schizophrenic subjects and 6 controls. The schizophrenic subjects had
significantly lower cerebral spinal fluid copper values than controls. Tough to
rub your tongue around those ones.
Looking again at schizophrenia, 23 hair trace elements were
determined with a method of inductively coupled phosmacontrameter (?). In 85
cases of schizophrenics and 65 cases of normal controls. Now my best friend is
a PhD in physics and I had to find out what is an inductively coupled
phosmacontrameter and it turns out it is a method for taking organic samples
stripping off the metallic ions so you can measure the percentage of metals in
the sample.
As a whole, 17 trace elements were decreased in
schizophrenics than in normal controls and the differences were significant.
Less than point zero one percent margin of error. Anything from point zero five
percent or less is considered significant for medical research. So, point zero
one is highly significant. Again looking at affective disorders, 21 Nigerians,
11 males and 10 females and 10 males (NOTE NOT AN ERROR IN TRANSCRIBING) with
symptomatic affective disorders ???? and 40 normal controls. The plasma and
erythrocyte copper and erythrocyte phosphorus, calcium and iron and zinc were
significantly lower in the patients compared with the controls. The reason they
did plasma and erythrocyte samples is plasma is notoriously poor for many
elements that determines how much is in the body. We had one case where the
doctor didn't want his patient going onto the open case study program because
she had very elevated calcium levels in her plasma. When we checked more
closely, we discovered the reason she had severely elevated plasma calcium
levels was that she was in the midst of severe osteoporosis and the body was
busy shunting all the calcium out of her skeleton into her bloodstream.
As her central nervous down to normal. So it is important that you go looking but it is important
that you go looking in the right places. Here with hyperactivity – every
teacher 's favourite – the magnesium, zinc, copper, iron and calcium levels of the plasma,
erythrocytes and urine and hair in 50 children age 4 to 13 years with
hyperactivity were examined by AA Best oops. Well it showed that the role of
these elements would require further elucidation. Can't go backwards on this.
Here we have autistic children. Autism is a tough one. The
kids are lost in inside their own little world. Sometimes not very happy and other
times just not accessible to the parent. Often they are not fearful. They don't
like to be touched. They don't like to be held. They 'll pull away. They won't
make eye contact. It 's heartbreaking to be the parent of an autistic child. And parents put immense work into trying to
help their autistic children. They 'll spend hour after hour a day on special
programs just to try and get some improvement. But autistic population has
significantly lower levels of magnesium, calcium, copper, manganese and chromium
and higher levels of lithium as compared to sex and age matched controls.
We have started working with autism. The early data looks
encouraging but it 's too soon. It 's four children ages 5 to 8 ˝. The minimum
reduction in symptoms we 've seen is 20% but how far its gonna go we don't yet
know and the sample is too small to draw any firm (?) conclusions at this point
but the data 's gone off to the universities and it will be taken further from
there.
Well, people have been taking vitamins for a long time.
There 's a zillion supplements on the market so how come people don't get
better? And doctors have been trying
things for a long time. They 've given zinc. They give chromium, lithium, etc,
etc, lecithin, essential fatty acids. All kinds of things they 've tried giving
to people and a percentage of people always show some improvement. But they
didn't get better. It just didn't make sense. They figured they were in the
forest but they couldn't find the tree. The answer is if you look at this dam,
presumably . .it 's doing what its supposed to be doing holding water behind it.
Obviously, if you punch a bunch of holes in the dam the water runs out. But
what isn't so immediately obvious when its not visual is when you fill the
deepest hole, the dam doesn't fill up. It only just fills up to the next hole –
called the principal of the first limiting nutrient
A couple of years ago, Dr. Kaplan started contacting
American universities and except for recently Harvard, they all said no. You 're
dealing with multiple variables. That 's not the scientific method. The
scientific method is that you change one variable at a time and you track the
change and that 's what they 've been doing for the better part of 20 years.
They 've known for 20 years that people with migraine headaches have low tissue
magnesium levels compared to control groups. They had the principal right but
the execution wrong. The true scientific method is you fill up all the holes to
the top and then you look for volunteers to have all the zinc taken out of their
diet and take a recreational trip into madness for six months.
That would be a little difficult to get volunteers but that
would be the true scientific method. That appears to be why we didn't get to
where we were in 1996 a long time ago. There are some other issues as well
because for example calcium, calcium carbonate which is Tums is roughly 2%
absorbable for a person with a normal bowel system. For people with inhibited
uptake which appears to be most people suffering from CNS disorders it might only
be a half a percent absorbable. Whereas the calcium amino acid chelate complex
that we use in this formula is 40% absorbable and that had to go all the way
too (?) because they knew that people with migraine headaches were low in
magnesium so they stuffed it full of magnesium well milk of magnesia what 's
that do it gives you diarrhea so it flushes right through you. You reach the
point of diminishing returns really quickly. So they have to find how to make
it so its bioavailable.. You also have to figure out the ratios.
My sister was allowed to be on the study before it went to
the open case program and she got a bottle every month with a serial number on
it and she had to do a symptom summary chart every month and they would change
the ratios to prove the theory about what happens when you change the ratios.
For example the copper zinc ratios. You would never change them severely
because you didn't want to put people back in hospital but it was enough that
some months she be really spinning her wheels. There was one month where she
just couldn't close cupboard doors in the kitchen. She 'd come back in the
kitchen and all the cupboard doors were open because she always forgot to close
them.
So the absorbability and the ratios are important issues.
Well after they had quite a few people normalize, they started looking for
medical professionals who 'd be interested. And they went to quite a few
psychiatrists and it was predictably because this is a pretty major paradigm
shift, they didn't want to have anything to do with them. But Dr. Bryan Kolb
whose the neuroscientist who proved that brain cells regenerate a few years ago
and whose written up in Scientific American and in fact when I first saw the
data on this and I saw his name as one of the lead researchers, that caused me
to stop and pay attention. Especially since I had spent 11 years in
environmental remediation dealing with people with life threatening
fibromyalgia and chemical sensitivities. And I knew that a lot of these
problems were intractable and they weren't getting better with vitamin
therapies or anything else. Well Dr. Bryan Kolb, probably partly because he
didn't have a whole lot to lose. When you 've got that sort of reputation, you
can afford to take some chances. He looked at these two kids and he did a
literature search and he said I don't know what 's going on but I can't find any
cases of two children with bipolar schizoaffective disorder with rapid cycle
one going into spontaneous remission. It just doesn't happen.
So something going on here. I don't know what but something
so he took 12 children and one adult with ADHD which is sort of like the fruit
fly of the mental health industry. People don't usually die from it although
family and parents may want to. He tracked them for two weeks on Ritalin of
dexedrine. He then tracked them for two weeks on nothing. And he then tracked
them for 5 weeks on what 's now known as the Synergy Program. Typically, for the
first week to 10 days there 's no change in ADHD and there can be 2 to 3 months
in some cases before there is any change. And we don't have the same very very
high percentage success rate today with ADHD that we do have with bipolar. But
nevertheless, he found that the average response on the five week program was
significantly higher effectiveness than the Ritalin or the dexedrine.
I don't think I have the copy of his abstract but anybody
whose interested in having their doctors involved I will send that information
to the doctors. In it he stated that his statistical uncertainty was point zero
zero zero one. Anything from point zero five less is significant for medical
research. That was highly significant. In other words that was not coincidence
and that is when he started calling people like Dr. Kaplan.. He started putting
things together, And then they took the data to the Alberta Heritage Medical
Fund to request the funding to do the initial studies. They did come up with
the money. The first study was presented, that 's the one that Dr. Kaplan was
talking about. Was presented Oct 4 to the Canadian Psychiatric Association 's
annual general meeting. There is also funded by the Alberta Heritage Medical
Fund a major double blind study into fibromyalgia which includes the mental
confusion, the irritable bowel disease, the anxiety disorder, the clinical
depression. There 's a whole host of conditions that run with fibromyalgia so in
effect they 're getting a half a dozen studies for the price of one. For that
one.
And there 's also a hundred body double blind study in
bipolar. That 's slated for release at the beginning of 2002 however because
bipolar responds so rapidly it is highly unlikely that the ethics committee
won't be required to break the code and release the study far far sooner than
that because the majority the vast majority of bipolars are down to little or
no medication within 3 to at most 4 months and often less. One of the things
that they 're finding is as people were normalizing the meds were brought down
step by step by step is that the doctors were keeping a little bit of risperdal
or a little bit of haldol or a little bit of lithium for safety.
Psychologically, it 's tough to take of that last medication but if you look at
the pattern and anybody that 's on the study they have to do a two week
baseline, then they have to do a weekly chart which is filled in daily and
needs to be called in to people such as myself and taken to the doctor weekly,
because the typical pattern is a drop of symptoms followed by an increase of
symptoms because as the body starts to normalize they start to become
overmedicated develop more adverse drug reactions. You reduce the medications
symptoms drop down again. Well if it 's been doing that for anywhere from 8 to
12 weeks, logically when you see the same pattern, when you get down to the
last 125 mg of epival the same thing also applies ?in almost all cases it does.
So now we 're finding that the actual reduction of symptoms
is higher in most cases is higher when the rest of that medication comes off.
As I say, we are not anti-medication and the reason this can't go on the market
yet is right now there is no control mechanism. By definition, it 's not a
prescription medication because there 's no toxicity issue, no side effects.
However, if we give it what we can legally do and call it a tonic and put a DIN
number and stick it on drug store shelves one of two things would likely
happen.
People would say I don't need my psychotherapeutic
medications, start popping these pills and wind up in hospital or worse. Or
just as bad, they start taking this and not have their meds reduced step by
step as is necessary and wind up in the hospital so until there is a formal
process through Health Canada to do that it won't be on the open market. It 'll
only be available for people on the open case study program. Now it is
absolutely critical that the doctor reduce those meds as the symptoms increase
otherwise they 've got to get off the study.
Now obviously of course the corollary of that is that if
someone is currently changing from one medication to another then they can't go
on the study until those medications are stabilized because otherwise they 'd
have no way of telling what 's going on. Is it the change in meds, are they over
medicating . . . . ...
Dr. Bryan Kolb also pointed out that if they were going to
take this forward they needed to have a way of formalizing the data in the
field. Because they needed to take it to the Alberta Heritage Medical Fund and
they needed to have enough data to make a compelling case. So he showed them
how to do the earlier of the symptom ? forms. They 're simpler now than they
used to be. This is Liana Vanderlinden who actually requested to have her name
included because she was the first person who was formally charted. She
suffered from multiple sclerosis. She 'd been diagnosed with 16 brain lesions by
MRI scan and suffered from clinical depression. She was on manerax 450 mg of
manerix . They tried two different types of tranquilizers and 15 different
anti-depressants in the past and never were able to have her well.
This is her symptoms when she started. She was on 450 mg of
manerax, feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, or helplessness very much.
Sleeping more or less than usual and her case it was more. Eating more or less
than usual in her case more very much. Hard to concentrate or decide very much.
Loss of interest in hobbies or activities very much. Avoiding other people very
much. It 's tough to socialize when you feel horrid. Overwhelming feelings of
sadness very much. Loss of energy feeling very tired very much. Thoughts of death
and suicide very much. She wasn't bipolar so she never got the excessively high
really ... Unreasonable optimism no but poor judgment yes. Hyperactivity or
racing thoughts very much. Talkitiveness, rapid speech or incoherence no because she wasn't bipolar.
Irritability very much. Extremely short attention span very much. Rapid shifts
to rage and sadness very much.
Speaking from experience when you 're suffering from
depression when you 've got a day that 's not too bad all of a sudden for no
reason it 's like somebody pricked a balloon you just go flat Whew, it 's so hard
to keep going. I was fortunate I was able to keep going. I did get married, I
raised kids and I actually raised them not too too badly. It had a big part in
my divorce. Had a big part in the person that I married. I didn't make anybody
happy out of my depression.
This on February 19 of 97. On February 26 there was no
change which is typical. On March 5, all of the very muches are gone and all of
the thoughts of death or suicide are gone or not at all. March 12 she still got ? down she 's still
got ? in the still 450 mg of mannerax All of a sudden boom. Look at all the
symptoms in the worst column . .. Adverse drug reactions reduce the mannerax to
300 mg March 26 dropping all off to the left (presumably a chart he was
showing). April 12 down to 75 mg again more of them “not at all” (symptoms on
chart) all the rest of them are “just little”. April 16 she is on no mannerax
and she is symptom free.
The interesting thing was and its way way too early for us
to draw any conclusions but we are tracking it but Autumn who was the first
woman to recover had MS as well. Lianna had MS. Lianna had cyclic MS so it was
possible that it was coincidence because she went symptom free but what 's
exciting was that when she went on a course of antibiotics she had a bump of
symptoms and that 's exactly the same pattern we see in the other central
nervous system conditions that we 're dealing with. When you take antibiotics
they are a broad spectrum biocide and they kill off the symbiotic bacteria that
help your gut absorb. We warn people that if they are on the study program and
they get sick and they have to take antibiotics they need to increase the level
of the supplement. They need to immediately start a course of broad spectrum
acidopholus with every meal to help replenish those bacteria as they are being
killed off. And they have to be aware of the fact that the psychotherapeutics
may need to be increased because when the gut becomes less absorbent, things
start to go wrong.
So except for that one time she was on antibiotics, she has
been symptom free since. A sample is too small but we do now have five or six
people with MS who are on the study program because they have other conditions.
In fact one of them is on it because she has MS and she has nothing to lose.
She 's not remissive she 's going down the hill pretty rapidly. So, hopefully we
will get the data. This is showing her symptom summary form on the dates they
were recorded and the spike for that first drug reaction. Now, they 'd seen
bipolar coming down pretty consistently and the depressives most of them were
coming down so what about schizophrenia.
Doctor Kolb said no not a chance. Bipolar, depression
anxiety that 's pretty exciting but
there 's not a hope that you 're going to
have schizophrenia coming around. It 's not even worth trying. Well, maybe it
and maybe it isn't. Schizophrenia is a tough condition. We don't have anything
like the success rate with schizophrenia that we do with bipolar and it takes a
lot longer. We do have some who 've gone symptom free. More often they 're able
to reduce their medications and have considerably fewer symptoms. But its not
the magic sort of effect that we see with bipolar. Although some people are
schizophrenic and have been diagnosed with schizophrenic and they 're probably
actually bipolar schizoaffective disorder. Because we 've seen some people whose
symptoms have dropped very very rapidly within 3 or 4 months and that 's not
typical of schizophrenia. So its possible they 're untypical response but more
likely they are bipolar schizoaffective disorder.
I should mention that if there is anybody here with
fibromyalgia or any other condition that makes it difficult to sit by all means get up and wander around I
certainly won't be offended.
So Gloria ? was the first schizophrenic to be tried. Her
life wasn't great. Hallucinations and delusions very much.. She saw bugs on the
wall. She heard voices every day, And the voices with schizophrenia are not
voices like good job you know. Great guy go do it. It doesn't happen that way.
They are saying horrific things. Constantly putting people down and telling
people things they would never ever consider doing. ? Very much extremely
disorganized thoughts very much, inappropriate emotional response very
much Abandonment of personal hygiene
very much. Social withdrawal very much. Intense depression pretty much.
Inability to concentrate very much. Avoiding activities and hobbies pretty
much. Thoughts of death and suicide very much. She had two major suicide
attempts that required a great many stitches to sew her up. Extreme
religiousness pretty much and this is different from being a person of faith.
This is a morbid preoccupation taken far beyond anything that could ever be
considered to be normal faith issues. It 's a sick preoccupation taken with
really bizarre side effects usually. Drug or alcohol abuse no fortunately for
her. Forgetfullness very much. Unusual sensitivity to stimuli pretty much.
Staring pretty much. Rigid stubbornness pretty much. Now I lived with that.
Hyperactivity or inactivity very much. 99% of her time for 5 years she spent in bed. Her husband would get her
up to go to the bathroom and eat and she 'd be back to bed again.
Unfortunately I don't have the dates as they got cut off as
they got put into the computer somehow. She responded extremely well which is
not typical of schizophrenia. Again . . mostly not at alls. . . ...At this point
she 's down 25% of her medication and her original (?) medication. Well she stayed
at 25% of her medication and she was doing very well at 25% of her medication
But it wasn't that cheap and she figured that she was well she 'd stop taking
it. And the symptoms bounced right back so they came back and said can we get
back on this. And I said yes if you 're willing to go to the University of
Calgary and be monitored by the psychiatrists there step by step. Which is why
you see a slower response rate the second time because they brought her down
more slowly.
Now unfortunately Gloria as many people do she gained a huge
amount of weight with all the medications she was on for so many years and she
also developed a hernia. She decided to have the hernia operation done because
she was up and about. Her neighbours discovered they actually still had a woman
living next door cause they hadn't seen her for years. And she went to have the
hernia operation done and unfortunately when people are very heavy there are
some increased risks and she developed a blood clot and died. Her family asked
that her name and case be used as a memorial to her. We 're grateful to them for
this.
This is a case of schizophrenia showing a more typical
response time starting Feb 3 and being down to minimal symptoms by Sept 1. This
is personality disorder. Personality disorder is a ? sounding name for a
horrific condition where people have to self mutilate. They have a compulsion
and what people who have recovered have told is that when they don't do that
they have no feeling whatsoever. We just have no input and so when we cut
ourselves, we gouge ourselves with forks and that adrenalin rush allows us to
feel normal. Well this woman was taken into ?? 's home and responded quite
rapidly. They didn't have her . I think she was on Paxil if I remember
correctly but she did not respond to medication. Its ' very very difficult to
treat people they call themselves cutters. She did have a major spike when she
came down with a bacterial infection and went on antibiotics but when she came
through it things dropped down. She still occasionally gets the ? thoughts but
she hasn't had to cut for a long time.
We also have a school teacher in Ottawa who suffered from
personality disorder and severe seasonal affective disorder. Every fall he
would start to become psychotic and he 'd be psychotic through the winter. He
was severely suicidal. In fact he was spending much of his time on the suicide
chat lines and how to get help to suicides and he 's a school teacher. He
finally got on to it last summer, he normalized and he said well I feel great now
but this fall is going to be the clincher because if I go through October
without becoming psychotic than I 'll know I 'm on to something. Not only did he
go through October without being psychotic he 's been through the winter and
spring without being psychotic. He 's working full time, he has a girl friend
and he 's just bought his first house. And he said that if anybody is a cutter
and they need to talk to somebody personality disorder self mutilating and they
need to talk to somebody whose been through it to give them their e-mail or
their ? address and he will talk to them cause he says people have to know that
it 's a horrible way to live.
I 'm not going to go through all these case studies but this
is typical of a quick responding bipolar. The quickest we ever saw was a
teenage girl She went normal in 18 days after medication reduction after
medication reduction because she got better worse better worse better worse.
But she was the niece of a senior Alberta Government official. If you 've got to
have somebody turn around like lightening that 's the one you want. And in fact
the Alberta health ministry is taking a serious look at making this now in the
near future covered for anybody on disability or any of the things that would
be covered by the provincial drug plan.
This is a little more typical response in bipolar. A little
longer than some. This is depression showing what happens. Often as people are
normalizing particularly with depression and anxiety disorders It 's a bit of a
roller coaster. The symptoms get better and the meds come off and the symptoms
get better and the meds come off. But after they 're off all the meds, these
medications are stored in the fatty tissue in the body and as a result as
somebody loses weight or their exercising the medications are flushed into the
blood stream. Every gram of fat that 's burned off has it 's ? of
psychotherapeutic medications. So we get people who 've been off their
medications for 6 months and they go off bicycle riding and they come back and
say what 's going on I 'm having a haldol day. Well it 's an adverse drug reaction
from their own fatty tissue. Unfortunately, there 's nothing much you can do
about it except know that each time that happens that particular load of
psychotheraputics is gone for good.
And this is what we 're showing here. Also with anxiety
depression there tends to be little aftershocks. Never like they were
previously but they tend to get less and less and less as time goes on. Also,
as time goes on ? people become less sensitive to stresses and being ill. The
last time I came down with a cold I had no symptoms at all whereas when I came
down with the flu shortly after I got symptom free I wasn't a happy puppy. And
again that 's fairly typical.
This is a fairly typical time frame for depression for most
people with depression we see it taking anywhere from 3 to 6 months. Tourette '
Syndrome. We don't have a huge number of cases but in the majority of cases
that we 've seen we see a significant reduction in symptoms. If Tourette 's goes
on with anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder ADHD if there 's a whole
host of conditions already together sometimes it takes a lot longer. We had one
13 year old boy who was a ward of the childrens aid took 4 months and he was
showing some change but nothing huge so we tried to put him back on medication
which hadn't been working before and we lost ground so rapidly that we put him
back on to this again and finally after 5 months he was starting to show
significant improvement. So sometimes when there are multiple conditions there
is a slower response.
We also have a woman who has serious fibromyalgia ADHD
obsessive compulsive disorder and clinical depression. And in her case she is
showing a steady improvement but nothing like the improvement you would expect
to see or in the same time frame.
This us a case of ADHD showing what happens when you run out
of supplements. END OF SIDE FEW MINUTES MISSED
SIDE TWO
. ...Remember we were talking it can help people often
there 's a family history for mental illness. David Hardy was the biochemist who
got all this started Never any history whatsoever in his family but more and
more we are starting to see families where there is no history whatsoever and
all of a sudden they are showing up in this generation of kids. Most of the
family were taking the supplements just for general health because they figured
well you know hehe. They 're working for these other things so maybe we 'll just
take smaller amounts just just to be safe.
The 17 year old son had no interest whasoever in taking
pills. At that point it wasn't pills either. It was a whole pile of liquids and
powders and patients and ? together and
carried around. All of a sudden out of nowhere the 17 year old ..had a psychotic
break. Bam. Pretty horrifying. So they started helping him .. Up the supplement
It was a long time coming back. The first but he was a teenager and teenagers
tend to respond more quickly but it was the first of April and he 's really sick
and finally the end of July he had let go and he hasn't had a problem since.
God willing he won't but you can bet that he 's taking a maintenance dose. It
wasn't a happy time.
People think that he was being bitten by snakes and cut by
saws and screaming rolling around on the bed and his father would say Landon
where 's the ? . ..
We 'll do one more which is my sisters. My sister suffered
from panic disorder and bipolar. I suffered from mild bipolar but I discovered
when I was ...working crazy hours under very high stress that if I left that
optimism bubbling I 'd be bouncing off the walls. I literally bouncing chuckling
chortling to myself . ..But it was always followed immediately after by the
depression. I just went and booked time off work. . . . . .
Last summer I was walking with my dog and a beautiful starry night I was walking through the
gardens and I automatically turned to my ? just to make sure I wasn't ...I
realized I 'm not starting to go mad. I didn't even think I was going mad. I
just new that when this happened that if I didn't squash it that I suffered depression
pretty ...
I realized that I 'm not manic I 'm happy .I 'm walking along
here on a beautiful starry night with my dog and I feel totally content.
...Well my sister 's bipolar neither of us can use mediations because we have
undesirable reactions like the inability to urinate. Which is not very
tranquilizing. When you go to the hospital they laugh at you. But when she was
manic she 'd be going and going and going two three hours sleep a night. When
she wasn't manic, she would suffer from the panic attacks When she became
depressive she would just crumble in on herself. It was almost like her face
was collapsing in. And we didn't know what was wrong. . .we suffered from these
feelings but we didn't realize that because we had never been really diagnosed.
They just gave us these medications because we were complaining. She 'd wake up
in the night and come racing up the stairs yelling:
Oh my god, oh my god oh my god oh my god what 's the matter.
I don't know (all said in a falsetto) And that went on for years. She dropped
down. She started on May 10 and by June
30 almost all of her symptoms were gone. Both of us go to bed and we go to
sleep at night. Now her great pleasure is to go to bed go to sleep pull the
cover up to her chin and go to sleep. To her that 's utter luxury. To me the
luxury is waking up the next morning and knowing that I 'm going to go to sleep
again the next night. Cause I go to bed and my brain keeps going and going and
going and going. It 's like if there was a plug in my brain I could run the city
on it. I was hyper productive man I could hardly wait to start finally fall asleep and wake up the next morning
dragging my but and trying to run my company.
. . . . . .For both of us there 's a strong genetic component
given our family history. For both of us the ? date after in my case just about
a year and her case a little over a year. If we stop taking them symptoms come
back. We 're both able to take significantly lower levels now. I was down to a
third of a dose but when I was under stress things started to come back so I
went back to a little under a half. And she 's at about 2/3 dose and she 's OK.
That 's typical for many many people to be able to reduce it. But for bipolar,
the first return of symptoms tends to be a feel good hypomania and unless
they 've got a really good support system they are better to simply stay at the
full level.
I 'm going to quickly flip past these and go to the
fibromyalgia. You can go on to the website and there 's a number of case studies
on the website as well. Fibromyalgia tough condition to live with. It 's not
just the pain it 's the mental confusion, the depression and the anxiety the
migraine headaches the irritable bowel disease. There 's a whole host of
conditions that are tough to live with. And doctors hate to diagnose people
with fibromyalgia because either they give them tricyclic antidepressants such
as amitryptilyn to try and help them sleep because most of them have sleep
problems as well. There 's really nothing much they can do for them.
This was a 46 year old psychologist – clinical psychologist
– who developed her fibromyalgia after the birth of her child. A very high
percentage of people with fibromyalgia they can point to a psychological or
physiological stressor that triggered and often with these conditions post
partum depression or the stresses of child birth can trigger ?
She suffered numbness around her mouth and her hands. She
was severely fatigued and had disturbed sleep patterns. She was checked for
multiple sclerosis with normal test results. No specific abnormalities have
been found in any of the laboratory tests during her initial and subsequent
evaluations. At the same clinic and if you 've ever been symptom free she tried
all the things that are tried for people with fibromyalgia. And Liam Martin is the one who is running the double blind
study now. After 13 months starting in April of '97 and ending in May of '98
her fibromylagia intrusive questionnaire has gone from 66.91 down to 6.35 and
that 's counting how much effect fibromylagia is having on her life. The ?
intrusive questionnaire has gone from 74 down to 13. The self efficacy
questionnaire which is a persons own perception of how good functioning went
from 580 up to 1110. Her total number of tender points went from 12 down to 6
and the myalgic score which is the severity of the tender points went from 48
to 6.
Now when you are publishing in a medical journal there is a
deadline to get the study in so they they published it presented it after 13
months. She did continue on and after 15 months the last of the pain points are
gone. With fibromyalgia typically the none pain aspects have been the quickest
to respond. Usually within two to four and at most four months if it is
straight fibromyalgia. If there 's a whole host of different conditions going on
well then it can take longer. And the pain points .. 6 to 15 months to respond.
But we don't have a 100% success rate with fibromylagia. Today we 're probably
running about 80%. Then again it 's a condition for which there is no known
treatment for the ? so even the 80% so long as you happen to be on the right
side of the fence is very significant.
In the paper that you took off the table, is Dr. Rich
Ferre 's study. One of Dr. Ferre 's studies. He is chief of psychiatric services
at Utah Primary Children 's Hospital. And one thing that comes up over and over
and over is safety. It has been assessed by numerous university and hospital
pharmacists for safety. And as Dr. Ferre says it is food put gravy on it and
eat it. A normal person could take if for the next 20 years and all that would
happen is that they would have expensive urine. Normally there are no
contraindications from doctors having been working with their patients on this.
Either unusual things that we have mentioned such as ? med changes. Also if a
person uses marijuana is not willing to stop it is absolutely ... out of the
study because we have never had a person return to normalcy when they are
using. We also find that alcohol is real bad medicine for people with these
symptoms or these central nervous conditions as they 're responding. People can
tolerate a drink or two but anything more than that uh things go down hill in a
hurry.
The other three issues that people need to control and in
fact should control in dealing with central nervous system conditions are
sugar, caffeine and aspartame. Because all three of them will bind to elements
and take them out of the body. And even when you chelate them for example if
you are drinking coffee with the supplement a percentage of it will be bound
and taken out of the system before its able to . . . . ..
So he 's been quite fascinated with this. He 's a
rheumatologist and he 's the one who is running the double blind study. This is
just the abstract cover sheet from Dr. Rich Ferre 's initial tests. He 's now
working with quite a few different children at the clinic at the Primary
Children 's Hospital. On this abstract .. So what I 'm gonna do is open the floor
to questions . . . ..
Questions about reimbursement from drug plans and government
and cost and how to appeal refusal by governments. Because of talk most of the
questions not picked up on the tape.
