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A member of MindFreedom Oregon had a letter to the editor published in the Corvallis Gazette-Times in Oregon, USA about his preference for nutritional medicine over psychiatric medication. Feel free to forward, author responsible for content:
‘Nutritional medicine’ best for brain disorders
Date Published:
Author: Chris Foulke, Corvallis
Source: Corvallis Gazette-Times
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http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2008/12/26/news/opinion/3edi03_friletters1226.txt
“Mental illness” is largely mythology. The idea that someone’s mind has merely gone awry is inherited from ignorant history: misunderstanding, religiosity, vacant moralizing, Freudian guesswork and psychobabble — pitiful explanations for folks whose physical brains just got sick. The largely negative, stigmatic term “mental illness” derives from those successively less dark ages, culminating in the still-very-dark age of chemical suppression, the dominant “therapy.”
Drug-based psychiatry is predominantly profit-motivated. Behind philosophical fog banks and oddball chemistry, psychiatrists seamlessly practice symptom management, pharmaceutical auto-suggestion, and required labeling. “Consumers” come in fourth.
Unfortunately, you can’t pimp enough non-randomly drug-based, doubly-blind, dollar-controlled studies to hide the blindness of supplying toximolecular substances (medications) to treat natural breakdowns of brain function, while denying simple, straightforward, and effective nutritional solutions.
American health has degenerated rapidly under an onslaught of mass-produced, highly processed, structurally altered, and nutritionally depleted “food.” Malnourishment is now common here.
Hopefully, people will find out that “nutritional medicine” using whole foods and quality supplements is phenomenally effective on a wide variety of classic illnesses of body, brain, and mental functioning.
Nutritional (“orthomolecular”) psychiatrists regularly report 80 percent success in correcting common metabolic brain disorders (depression, bipolar, anxiety, Alzheimer’s, autism).
Nutritional therapy, contrary to what some industry-educated nutritionists say, is extremely safe (thousands of times safer than drug therapy). Suggested therapeutic foods and relevant supplements would cost a fraction of medications without the inevitable side effects. Compare $75-$150 for a complementary nutritional program with $300-$1,200 plus per month, not uncommon for subsidized “psych meds.”
Chris Foulke, Corvallis