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Big Pharma Attack on Alternative Medicine: Flawed St. John's Wort Study on ADHD Failed to Use Active Form of Herbal Extract 6-14-08
By. Mike Adams
On the heels of shocking revelations that top psychiatric research Dr. Joseph
Biederman secretly took $1.6 million from drug companies while conducting
psychotropic drug experiments on children, it has been learned that Dr.
Biederman is now one of the key collaborators behind the latest efforts to
discredit St. John's Wort. In a study published in the Journal of the American
Medical Association and widely reported in the mainstream media, Dr. Biederman
and fellow cohorts "concluded" that the St. John's Wort herb is useless in
treating ADHD in children.
What's astonishing about this study, as you'll learn in this article, is that
all the children used in the study were given inactive forms of the St. John's
Wort herb where the active ingredients had been oxidized and rendered useless!
In other words, this clinical trial, which was widely reported in the mainstream
media with headlines like "St. John's Wort Found Useless!" didn't test the
herb's active ingredients at all! It sort of makes you wonder about the agenda
of the people running the study, doesn't it?
Keep in mind that one of the study's authors, Dr. Biederman, is not merely on
the take from drug companies that sell competing pharmaceuticals, but that he
also lied about how much money he was being paid by drug companies, hiding the
truth about his income by underreporting $1.6 million he took from psychiatric
drug companies. See my report on that here: http://www.naturalnews.com/023408.html
Dr. Biederman has a clear financial interest in promoting patented prescription
drugs for brain chemistry disorders while discrediting competing natural
alternatives such as St. John's Wort. This blatant conflict of interest was not
disclosed by JAMA, nor was it mentioned in the text of the study on ADHD and St.
John's Wort. It appears Dr. Biederman would prefer his financial ties to Big
Pharma continue to remain secret, even while producing questionable studies that
desperately attempt to show that herbs don't work.
Testing Herbs to Treat Fictitious Diseases
Well, beyond the fact that the herb used in the trial was entirely inactive
(meaning it was rendered useless even before the study began), there's also
another burning issue that questions the credibility of the study: ADHD doesn't
exist in the first place!
There is no such thing as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It's
something that psychiatrists just made up and voted into existence in order to
sell more drugs to children. There is no objective test for this "disease," nor
is there any physiological evidence of any kind that it exists at all. Thus, to
test an inactive herb on a disease that doesn't exist, and then declare the herb
doesn't work is an outrageous example of extreme intellectual dishonesty. And
yet it's precisely the kind of sleight-of-hand quackery carried out by modern
psychiatry -- an industry that has nothing to offer society other than
mind-numbing drugs, medication addictions and chemically-induced violence,
obesity and diabetes.
But why let modern psychiatry have all the fun inventing diseases? I could just
as easily invent a disease called "Stupid Scientist Disease" (SSD) and then test
aspirin on SSD. When I demonstrated that aspirin had no effect on SSD, I could
submit the paper to JAMA, get it published, and have the national media report
with blaring headlines, "Aspirin Doesn't Work to Treat Stupid Scientist
Disease!"
And if they actually print that, then we could move on to test aspirin on
"Stupid Journalist Disease," which also appears to be an epidemic in modern
society.
How to discredit natural medicine and spread fear, uncertainty and doubt
All this has the effect of making the medicine being tested look bad, which of
course was the whole point of conducting this study on St. John's Wort in the
first place. Modern medical research is not about pursuing science, nor truth,
nor objective understanding about health. It is about pushing an agenda, and
it's clear that the agenda of Dr. Biederman and colleagues is about diagnosing
more children with more brain chemistry "diseases," then demanding that they all
be put on mind-altering drugs, all while desperately trying to convince the
public that herbs are useless.
By the way, you can invent your own psychiatric conditions at the click of your
mouse by using my free, highly-entertaining Disease Mongering Engine available
here: http://www.naturalnews.com/disease-mongering-engine.asp
I had hoped to create a similar online engine where you can randomly generate
fictitious scientific papers filled with psychobabble nonsense, but it appears
JAMA has already beat me to it...
St. John's Wort, for the record, has been clinically proven to be even more
effective than antidepressant drugs for treating mild to moderate depression.
That makes it better than all the SSRI drugs ever invented, but you don't hear
medical journals reminding anybody about that simple fact, do you? Instead, they
go out of their way to test it for the wrong condition -- a fictitious
condition! -- as an excuse to simply say St. John's Wort doesn't work for
something.
A Disturbing Trend: Bastyr Naturopaths Partner with Dr. Biederman to Discredit
Herbs
There's another disturbing trend in all this. The St. John's Wort study was led
by Wendy Weber, ND, a graduate of Bastyr University. Bastyr is an "integrative
medicine" med school that teaches drug-based medicine combined with more natural
modalities. It's one of the top three naturopathic schools in the U.S., and yet
to learn that one of its graduates is now collaborating with a psychiatric drug
pusher who has been paid $1.6 million by drug companies is more than a bit
disturbing.
It indicates that this Bastyr graduate either has no idea about the true agenda
of the people she's working with or that she doesn't mind that agenda. Either
way, she sort of ends up looking rather silly with her name positioned above the
scandalous Dr. Joseph Biederman, a widely-hated Big Pharma disease monger who
will hopefully soon be arrested and prosecuted as a common criminal for
conducting medical experiments on four-year old children.
In the world of naturopathy, by the way, there is quite a chasm between the more
"conventional" N.D.s (like Bastyr graduates) and the holistic, natural,
salt-of-the-Earth kind of naturopathic healers who have no sponsoring
institution. The Bastyrs of the world are working hard to get naturopathic
medical practice legalized in many states, but they're also disliked by the
non-accredited naturopaths who end up being labeled criminals for practicing
their own brand of natural medicine in those same states.
Many non-accredited naturopaths insist that Bastyr is just a "green" replacement
for organized medicine's tyranny. Without a doubt, when people see Bastyr
graduates collaborating with top psychiatric drug pushers on a study that
clearly seeks to discredit a valuable herb, it just fans the flames of dissent
against Bastyr among more holistic practitioners.
What's my take on the issue? I think Wendy Weber must be a complete fool to lend
her name to such a study, because the very title of the study presupposes
something that's entirely false to begin with: That ADHD is a bonafide "disease"
in the first place. She even based the entire scoring of the participants'
symptoms on the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV -- the tome of
psychobabble "disorders" invented by a truly evil industry that seeks to label
every person still breathing with some sort of brain chemistry disorder (and
then demand that they all be "treated" with mind-altering drugs that just happen
to enrich their corporate sponsors, the drug companies!).
Remember, the DSM-IV is the manual that declares fear of public speaking to be a
"disorder." In fact, all the following are "mental health disorders," according
to the DSM-IV manual:
• Questioning authority (i.e. asking questions of medical authorities)
• Feeling overwhelmed by too many tasks (like we all are...)
• Being excitable (WHAT?)
• Frequently taking risks (like every entrepreneur in the world...)
• Inappropriately messy (like my desk...)
• Showing excessive stubbornness (No, I'm not stubborn!)
• Being argumentative (Oh yeah? Say that to my face...)
• Losing things (Where did I park my car, again?)
... and this list continues, including descriptions of virtually every human
emotion, thought or behavior. According to the DSM-IV, these are all diseases!
How many of these familiar to you? Don't we all lose our keys from time to time?
Don't we all have messy desks (except all you clean freaks, but don't get me
started on your cleanliness "disorder" okay?) Don't we all feel overwhelmed from
time to time by too many tasks?
This is the great gimmick of modern psychiatry: They just keep naming symptoms,
behaviors and thoughts until they find one that you've got! Then they declare
you to be "sick" and needing "treatment," and that's when the mind-altering
medications begin.
Personally, I'm shocked to learn of a Bastyr graduate lending any credence
whatsoever to the DSM-IV manual and the fictitious diseases of modern
psychiatry. It is shameful that such a well-educated individual would spend her
time and effort in such a futile psychobabble exercise that proves nothing, and
I can only hope that Wendy Weber refocuses her considerable talents into a more
productive direction in the future. (I also hope that she denounces the actions
of Dr. Biederman for lying about the $1.6 million he took from Big Pharma while
pushing psych drugs for children... but that's her choice, of course.)
Problems with the trial
Beyond the fatal problem of studying the effects of an herb on a fictitious
disease in the first place, this trial suffers from all sorts of other
scientific showstoppers. For starters, there were only 54 people used in the
results of the trial, with 27 receiving placebo and 27 receiving St. John's
Wort. This is a very small sample size to justify any declaration that St.
John's Wort doesn't work, especially given the fact that it has been safely and
effectively used by tens of millions of people around the world in just the last
decade or so.
Secondly, more than 40 percent of the children used in the study had previously
used psychiatric medications, so their brains have already been damaged by psych
drugs even before the study began! Psych drugs actually cause behavioral
disorders and long-term brain damage (which is evidenced by the fact that so
many children commit violent acts against themselves and others after taking
psychiatric medications). So why would an honest researcher study the
effectiveness of an herb on the brains of children that were already damaged by
psychiatric drugs in the first place? Unless, of course, they wanted the trial
to fail... but we'll get to that later.
Thirdly, the study contains numerous protocol mistakes that distort the final
results. For example, six children who displayed a large response to placebo
were supposed to have been dropped from the study to isolate the herb's effects
from placebo effects, but these kids were accidentally randomized and thrown
into the mix anyway, thereby distorting the final results in favor of placebo
responders, which makes the herb responders look weaker by comparison. This
troubling error in the study is never pointed out, of course, in the mainstream
media (whose journalists don't understand science anyway, and can't interpret
statistics with any degree of mathematical competence).
A fourth problem in the study is that young males are far more susceptible to
the kinds of behaviors that are labeled as "ADHD," compared to young females,
and yet in this study, the placebo group consisted of only about 50% males while
the herb treatment group consisted of nearly 75% males. In other words, the
placebo group was predisposed to a positive outcome simply due to its
composition of females vs. males, while the herb treatment group was predisposed
to a less-than-favorable response.
And finally, it turns out that the children used in this trial may not have been
receiving any active St. John's Wort at all! As stated directly in the JAMA
publication for this study:
The product used in this trial was tested for hypericin and hyperforin content
at the end of the trial and contained only 0.13% hypericin and 0.14% hyperforin.
Stop the presses! Are you telling me that the St. John's Wort used in this trial
contained barely one-tenth of one percent of the active chemical constituents in
the herb? Quality St. John's Wort supplements typically contain up to five
percent hyperforin, or thirty-five times the amount of active ingredient used in
this trial! In other words, the St. John's Wort being tested in this trial was a
sub-clinical dose, barely containing any usable St. John's Wort at all!
It's kind of like testing a dose of 2mg of aspirin to see if it has any
pain-relieving effect. Of course it doesn't, the dosage is too small!
But it gets even better. As the study text published in JAMA also admits:
Hyperforin is a very unstable constituent that quickly oxidizes and then becomes
inactive, which is likely what happened to the product used in this clinical
trial.
What the heck? Did the study authors just admit that the St. John's Wort they
used in the trial was INACTIVE because it all oxidized? Yes, that's exactly what
they said!
Absolutely amazing, isn't it? This study, which was blasted across newspapers,
websites and cable news problems, was all based on a study of INACTIVE St.
John's Wort given at sub-clinical doses to a group of placebo-biased children
diagnosed with a fictitious disease!
A Classic Case of Junk Science
This, friends, is the state of junk science today in our modern medical
industry. It is disgusting to see such papers making headline news, knowing that
the whole point of this study was clearly to fabricate scientific-sounding lies
about the uselessness of a very useful herb, and thereby misinform consumers and
drive more people to take drugs for ADHD. I'm not at all surprised, of course,
to see that JAMA gladly published it.
Wendy Weber, you should be ashamed of your role in this junk science fiasco, and
your authorship of this obviously politically-motivated study brings great
dishonor to the university from which you graduated. If you're going to push
drugs and discredit herbs by using contorted, intellectually dishonest trials
that are engineered to fail in the first place, then you might as well just slap
the letters M.D. after your name and stop using N.D. to describe your
credentials. Don't parade around as a naturopath if you're pulling stunts like
this that result in consumers being gravely misled about the efficacy of herbs
for supporting healthy brain function.
For a Bastyr graduate to even take part in a study that lends any credence
whatsoever to the DSM-IV -- and all its loopy, made-up descriptions of disorders
-- really makes me wonder what's happening in the classrooms over there these
days. I've interviewed both Joseph Pizzorno and Michael T. Murray on several
occasions, and I've found them to be extremely well-informed, high-integrity
individuals who were highly instrumental in the founding and the success of
Bastyr University. I couldn't imagine Michael T. Murray ever being involved in
such a poorly-designed study that seems to have set out -- from the very
beginning -- to obfuscate the efficacy of a valuable herb that's been used for
literally thousands of years to support healthy brain function.
How modern medical researchers use sleight of hand to commit fraud
This is a favorite tactic of modern medical researchers who wish to discredit
herbs, vitamins or supplements: They simply use sub-clinical doses or
poorly-assimilated nutrients that never make it to the bloodstream, then they
declare the herb (or vitamin, or nutrient, or whatever) to be useless!
This is exactly what happened in the recent trials that tested Vitamin D on
prostate cancer. The headlines touted the sensationalized conclusion that
"Vitamin D Has No Effect on Prostate Cancer!" But what was the truth behind the
study?
As it turns out, virtually none of the men used in the study showed any
appreciable level of Vitamin D in their blood. That's because most of the men
studied in the trial didn't take their supplements! It's no surprise that if you
don't actually take your vitamin D supplements, they probably won't prevent
prostate cancer for you, right? Yet this astonishing fact is NEVER mentioned in
the mainstream press reporting on this study. It's just one fact of many that
are routinely ignored by a national media more interested in trashing natural
medicine than actually reporting anything based on facts.
We saw this same tactic with one study on women's bone health and calcium
intake, by the way. The headline blared, "Calcium Found Useless in Preventing
Osteoporosis!" but what the study actually proved -- to anyone who bothered to
read it -- was that women who don't take calcium supplements don't experience
any benefits from them.
No kidding? Gee. And people who buy books but don't read them somehow don't
learn anything from them, either.
Supplements don't work if they're still sitting on your shelf. You actually do
have to consume them to experience their benefits. This should be obvious to
health reporters working in the mainstream media, but sadly, they still don't
grasp this rather obvious fact.
Neither did JAMA, it appears, since they went ahead and published this study
about ADHD and St. John's Wort even when it turns out that none of the children
likely consumed any active St. John's Wort ingredients after all.
By the way, don't you find it curious that the study authors only tested the
potency of the St. John's Wort supplements AFTER the study was completed, rather
than before? It's almost as if they didn't want to know the potency before they
started the trials.
Bad science conducted under the guise of good science is worse than bad science
by itself, because it carries disinformation clothed in the credibility of good
science and thereby acts as a virus of the mind that infects consumers. That
mental virus is driven even deeper by the illusion of authority, thereby making
it ever more difficult for consumers to later purge those lies from their belief
systems so that they might awaken to the truth about healing with natural
medicine.
It is in this way that JAMA, and Wendy Weber, and the mainstream media all
perform a great disservice to the American people and further deepen the
epidemics of malnutrition, disease and over-medication that threaten the very
future of the western world.
Sample headlines from the mainstream media
By the way, here's a sampling of the headlines from mainstream media sources. As
you read these, realize that nobody bothered to actually read the study! (Or if
they did, they didn't understand it...)
St. John's wort fails to help kids with ADHD
The Associated Press
St. John's Wort Doesn't Work for ADHD
Washington Post
St. John's Wort No Help in ADHD
ABC News
St. John's wort no better than placebo for ADHD, Bastyr study finds
Seattle Times
St. John's Wort No Help for ADHD
TIME Magazine
Herb does not ease ADHD
ZDNet
St. John's wort doesn't help ADHD, study finds
Reuters