A Harvard Medical School lecturer, psychologist and Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard, Irving Kirsch, was recently featured in a CBS60 Minutes new program with a claim that put a chink into the pharmaceutical industry’s armor. Professor Kirsh provided a documented conclusion that pharmaceutical anti-depressants don’t work for mild to moderately depressed patients. What’s more, a placebo is almost always nearly as effective – without the side-effects.
These findings had psychiatrists and the FDA livid. Why? Kirsch’s conclusion was featured in a national CBS 60 Minutes television report.
Now, it is more difficult for Big Pharma to peddle psychiatric drugs on TV and radio, which is allowed only in the USA and New Zealand. Even more importantly, Kirsch’s conclusion was evidence based on documents obtained from using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Those documents were trial results from drug companies that were not published and presented to the FDA.
Drug companies pay the FDA for approving their drugs, but the FDA doesn’t perform it’s own trials, Instead, the organization simply takes the reports from drug companies – reports that came to be by the drug companies’ own trials. Further, the drug companies choose which of these trials to publish and submit.
Kirsch found that the majority of anti-depressant trials showed little to no proof of efficacy. Those results were simply hidden from view. So if 12 tests were done, and only two showed any efficacy at all, those two would be submitted to the FDA, and the FDA would essentially say “pay your fee and go to market.” Other research has found these medications to even worsen depression.
After analyzing the results of all the tests, he was able to procure via FOIA, Kirsch concluded that anti-depressant drugs had only a placebo effect on patients with mild to moderate depression. In other words, a sugar pill would suffice. He went public with this conclusion on a CBS TV 60 Minutes news program.
Irving Kirsh is also the author of The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Here’s a quote from that book: “Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.”
Here’s a reminder: All pharmaceutical drugs have side effects. Sometimes it’s viewed as a tolerable trade-off, sometime it’s not. And whatever relief is offered is not ultimately a cure. It’s illness management only. As just one example, some research has found antidepressants to actually cause your arteries to thicken 400% more than aging – a main factor in the thickening of the arteries. Ultimately, this leads to heart disease and stroke.
60 Minutes Presented a Limited Hangout
A limited hangout indicates only enough information has been released to satisfy most that full disclosure and accountability has occurred when it hasn’t. CBS did not reveal any of horrible side effects from anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs, including many attempts at suicide, some successful, and homicidal thoughts, some executed.
CBS did interview a British medical official who was part of a UK commission that banned anti-depressant use on mild to moderately depressed patients. He reasoned that since most moderately depressed patients can be handled by talk therapy and physical exercise, why expose them to the risk of adverse side effects? Sixty Minutes didn’t follow up on that angle.
Pharmaceuticals are advertised in newspapers and magazines, radio, and TV. Anyone seeing happy people portrayed by actors proclaiming how an anti-depressant changed their lives can almost demand that drug from even a primary care physician, and usually get it prescribed.
Even Medscape lists these side effects from SSRI and SNRI anti-depressants: Abnormal bleeding, hepatitis, headache, hyponatrenia (potentially deadly low sodium), toxic epidermal necrolysis (potentially deadly skin death), impotence, abnormal sensations, mania and suicide.
Of course, the drug peddling MDs, psychiatrists, and Big Pharma unequivocally deny causation. But relatives of the deceased and accused killers know things got intensely worse when the drugs began. Not all of the deceased committed suicide. Some died from those listed physical side effects or others as well.
Facebook’s ‘like’ button can reveal more than you realize, a new study has showed. By liking posts and links, you may be revealing personal secrets, like your sexuality or religious and political views. The findings have raised privacy concerns.
A study by the National Academy of Sciences examined 58,000 Facebook users in the US, who volunteered their likes, demographic profiles and psychometric test results. Researchers managed to draw “surprisingly accurate” findings about a given user’s race, IQ, sexuality, substance use, personality and political views by analyzing the topics and items they ‘liked,’ even if they set strong privacy settings for their page.
The study’s authors developed an algorithm that uses Facebook ‘likes’ to create personality profiles, potentially revealing a user’s personality. Anyone with training in data analysis could be able to derive such information, even if users had not explicitly shared it, they explained.
As a result, researchers were able to predict whether men were homosexual with 88 percent accuracy by their ‘like’ clicks on sites related to gay marriage or same-sex relations. Preferences of music and TV shows, for example, were also more revealing than users may have imagined: Men who liked the musical TV show ‘Glee’ were more likely to be gay, the study showed.
In 82 percent of cases, Christians and Muslims were correctly identified among the volunteer profiles. And the study was not only predictive of sexuality or religion, but also a user’s IQ.
Those with higher IQs tended to more frequently like ‘The Colbert Report’ TV show, for example, or films like ‘The Godfather’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Those with lower IQs liked Harley Davidsons and Bret Michaels of the rock band Poison.
Similarly accurate predictions were also made about users’ political views, and could even predict potential voting patterns during elections, mapped to users’ relationship status, their number of Facebook friends and a half-dozen other personality traits.
“The important point is that, on one hand, it is good that people’s behavior is predictable because it means Facebook can suggest very good stories on your news feed,” South China Morning Post quoted Michal Kosinsky, one of the academics behind the study as saying.
While the study could be seen as a new step towards creating more personalized content, it also highlighted the potential threats to privacy posed by Facebook. “What is shocking is that you can use the same data to predict your political views or your sexual orientation. This is something most people don’t realize you can do,” Kosinsky warned.
Similar profiles could be created using other digital data, including Web searches, emails and mobile phone activity, according to a co-author of the study: “Your likes may be saying more about you than you realize,” David Sitwell, a Cambridge University researcher said, according to AFP. “But you don’t realize that years later all those likes are building up against you.”
Though often too low or too high for human ears to detect, insects and animals signal each other with vibrations. Even trees and plants fizz with the sound of tiny air bubbles bursting in their plumbing.
And there is evidence that insects and plants “hear” each other’s sounds. Bees buzz at just the right frequency to release pollen from tomatoes and other flowering plants. And bark beetles may pick up the air bubble pops inside a plant, a hint that trees are experiencing drought stress.
Sound is so fundamental to life that some scientists now think there’s a kernel of truth to folklore that holds humans can commune with plants. And plants may use sound to communicate with one another.
If even bacteria can signal one another with vibrations, why not plants, said Monica Gagliano, a plant physiologist at the University of Western Australia in Crawley.
“Sound is overwhelming, it’s everywhere. Surely life would have used it to its advantage in all forms,” she told OurAmazingPlanet.
Gagliano and her colleagues recently showed corn seedling’s roots lean toward a 220-Hertz purr, and the roots emit clicks of a similar tune. Chili seedlings quicken their growth when a nasty sweet fennel plant is nearby, sealed off from the chilies in a box that only transmits sound, not scent, another study from the group revealed. The fennel releases chemicals that slow other plants’ growth, so the researchers think the chili plants grow faster in anticipation of the chemicals — but only because they hear the plant, not because they smell it. Both the fennel and chilies were also in a sound-isolated box.
“We have identified that plants respond to sound and they make their own sounds,” Gagliano said. “The obvious purpose of sound might be for communicating with others.”…
Do you notice you feel better when you walk barefoot on the Earth? Recent research has explained why this happens.
Your immune system functions optimally when your body has an adequate supply of electrons, which are easily and naturally obtained by barefoot contact with the Earth.
Research indicates that electrons from the Earth have antioxidant effects that can protect your body from inflammation and its many well-documented health consequences. For most of our evolutionary history, humans have had continuous contact with the Earth.
It is only recently that substances such as asphalt, wood, rugs, and plastics have separated us from this contact.
It is known that the Earth maintains a negative electrical potential on its surface. When you are in direct contact with the ground (walking, sitting, or laying down on the earth’s surface) the earth’s electrons are conducted to your body, bringing it to the same electrical potential as the earth. Living in direct contact with the earth grounds your body, inducing favorable physiological and electrophysiological changes that promote optimum health.
There is an emerging science documenting how conductive contact with the Earth, which has is also known as Earthing or grounding, is highly beneficial to your health and completely safe. Earthing appears to minimize the consequences of exposure to potentially disruptive fields like “electromagnetic pollution” or “dirty electricity.”
Some of the recent evidence supporting this approach involves multiple studies documenting Earthing’s improvement in blood viscosity, heart rate variability, inflammation, cortisol dynamics, sleep, autonomic nervous system (ANS) balance, and reduced effects of stress.
The Ultimate Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory
Grounding or Earthing is defined as placing one’s bare feet on the ground whether it be dirt, grass, sand or concrete (especially when humid or wet). When you ground to the electron-enriched earth, an improved balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system occurs.
The Earth is a natural source of electrons and subtle electrical fields, which are essential for proper functioning of immune systems, circulation, synchronization of biorhythms and other physiological processes and may actually be the most effective, essential, least expensive, and easiest to attain antioxidant.
Modern science has thoroughly documented the connection between inflammation and all of the chronic diseases, including the diseases of aging and the aging process itself. It is important to understand that inflammation is a condition that can be reduced or prevented by grounding your body to the Earth, the way virtually all of your ancestors have done for hundreds if not thousands of generations.
A ubiquitous chemical found in plastics, soup can linings, and receipts, bisphenol-a is just one health-compromising substance that has been under fire for many years. While the scientific community has gathered ample evidence regarding BPAs toxic effects, the chemical is still widely used today. Adding to this evidence, recent research has found that BPA could negatively impact brain development by disrupting a gene responsible for proper nerve cell function.
For the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and conducted by Duke University researchers, it was discovered that BPA could negative effect central nervous system development by disrupting a gene called Kcc2. With the disruption of this gene, it can no longer properly produce proteins partly responsible for removing chloride from neurons. If chloride can’t be removed, then the functioning of brain cells is hampered.
“Our study found that BPA may impair the development of the central nervous system, and raises the question as to whether exposure could predispose animals and humans to neurodevelopmental disorders,” study researcher Dr. Wolfgang Liedtke, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of medicine/neurology and neurobiology at Duke University, said. “Our findings improve our understanding of how environmental exposure to BPA can affect the regulation of the Kcc2 gene. However, we expect future studies to focus on what targets aside from Kcc2 are affected by BPA. This is a chapter in an ongoing story.”
The study abstract concludes with:
“Overall, our results indicate that BPA can disrupt Kcc2 gene expression through epigenetic mechanisms. Beyond increase in basic understanding, our findings have relevance for identifying unique neurodevelopmental toxicity mechanisms of BPA, which could possibly play a role in pathogenesis of human neurodevelopmental disorders.”
Avoiding BPA
Unfortunately, avoiding BPA is not quite as easy as it should be. Despite the endocrine-disrupting chemical being linked to reproductive problems, obesity, diabetes, and now negatively altered brain development, the FDA rejected BPA’s ban back in March 2012 – so now consumers need to look out for the chemical for years to come.
But there are still many tips for avoiding BPA and even reversing the negative effects sparked by the chemical. Here are a few tips:
Avoid using plastics whenever possible. Instead, use glass and filtered water for your bottled water. If you do use plastics, look for the recycling symbols with the numbers 2, 4, and 5. Avoid recycling symbols 3, 6, 7, and 1.
Buy BPA-free soup cans.
Use ceramic cookware.
Wear gloves if you’re constantly handling receipts or currency.
About Mike Barrett: Google Plus Profile | Mike is the co-founder, editor, and primary researcher behind Natural Society. Studying the work of top natural health activists, and writing special reports for top 10 alternative health websites, Mike has written hundreds of articles and pages on how to obtain optimum wellness through natural health.
Clifford Carnicom, founder of the Carnicom Institute, exposes the hard evidence that proves the source of the world’s most mysterious disease.
This is a compelling, uninterrupted lecture from the world’s original Morgellon’s researcher. Once again, it will be years before the public knows the information in this interview.
The States’ Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act would provide for the rescheduling of marijuana under the Controlled Substance Act to a listing other than Schedule I or II.
Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) released the following statement on the introduction of HR 689, the States’ Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act:
Along with a bipartisan group of cosponsors, I am introducing the States’ Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act, legislation that will allow medical marijuana patients and businesses–who are complying with state law–the ability to access and distribute marijuana free from federal interference.
Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing for the use of medical marijuana for people suffering from conditions such as cancer and severe nausea. As a result there are now hundreds of thousands of medical marijuana patients nationwide.
Despite these laws, at the federal level marijuana is currently listed as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act, meaning that it is considered a substance with a “high potential for abuse,” with “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” This means that the 19 jurisdictions that permit medical marijuana are operating in a patchwork of inconsistent local and federal laws.
These inconsistencies create significant challenges for both patients and the businesses working to provide access to medical marijuana. Because of federal tax and banking laws, marijuana businesses–despite operating in compliance with state or local law–are not allowed to deduct their legitimate business expenses and are often unable to make deposits or maintain bank accounts. Simultaneously, the federal government has continued to enforce federal law, and many medical marijuana facilities across the country have been raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration or otherwise targeted by the Department of Justice.
The federal government maintains a monopoly on access to marijuana for research, currently run by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The mission of this Institute is to “lead the Nation in bringing the power of science to bear on drug abuse and addiction,” and many researchers have found it difficult to obtain marijuana for research into the potential therapeutic or medicinal effects of marijuana.
The States’ Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act would provide for the rescheduling of marijuana under the Controlled Substance Act to a listing other than Schedule I or II, which would mean the federal government recognizes an accepted medical use. It would also ensure that neither the Controlled Substances Act nor the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act would restrict individuals, doctors or businesses from consuming, recommending, producing, distributing or otherwise operating in marijuana in compliance with state or local laws. Finally, it would require that access to marijuana for research into its potential medicinal and therapeutic uses be overseen by an entity in the government not focused on researching the addictive properties of substances.
Nineteen jurisdictions have passed laws recognizing the importance of providing access to medical marijuana for the hundreds of thousands of patients who rely on it. It is time for the federal government to respect these decisions, and stop inhibiting safe access. (Source)
by Paul Fassa
A ubiquitous chemical found in plastics, soup can linings, and receipts, bisphenol-a is just one health-compromising substance that has been under fire for many years. While the scientific community has gathered ample evidence regarding BPAs toxic effects, the chemical is still widely used today. Adding to this evidence, recent research has found that BPA could negatively impact brain development by disrupting a gene responsible for proper nerve cell function.
February 12, 2013
PN 