Working on my new book has forced me to go through thousands of papers looking for data to support ideas I want to talk about as well as uncovering new information to continually mold my scientific inquisitions. Over the past year or so, a number of highly respected journals such as Nature, JAMA, and Science, have had to write numerous articles about research fraud and how articles published in many different journals have had to be pulled. 

The most prominent of the cases is the work of South Korean cloning scientist Woo Suk Hwang and the papers he and his team published and all of the journals that have had to retract his work. This sadly, is not an isolated case.  Hundreds of papers have been retracted from numerous scientific and medical researchers over the past 10 years. Which makes you wonder how much more fraud has not been uncovered. Makes you wonder whether we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Still, alternative health practitioners, who view the Vioxx issue as the obvious fraud of the pharmaceutical industry should be wise not to point and shake their fingers too violently in any one direction.  There are a number of those in alternative medicine who have made claims that don’t match the data and when asked about it, claim that they are being unjustly persecuted because of their new ideas.

I was at a conference last year and I questioned one of the speakers privately about his claim of a 100% cure rate of autism.  My skeptical side came out and wondered how he and his female counter could do something never before accomplished in medical history, a perfect cure rate.  His comment was, “We don’t accept failure.”  Astonished, I went to his website and found parents who complained that the treatment, which was exceedingly expensive, wasn’t working.  The company response was as I expected, “You must be doing something wrong because we don’t accept failure as an option.”

Another doctor making the rounds in the autism community has made so many different claims about cure rates from his chelation therapy that no one knows what to believe.  When listening to him rant and rave about how those questioning his claims were out to get him, I had to add him to the growing list of hype masters. 

One last so-called researcher was someone who once worked for me who, when my wife asked her for advice while she was writing her masters thesis said, “Just copy the material out of the book, it’s how I write my papers.”  Thankfully, Hillary has a higher ethical standard than that woman had.  Looking at one of that person’s other papers, I noted that she cited the same reference 24 times in a three-page paper and used herself for the rest of the references.

The bottom line is “Who and what can you trust?”  As my mentor, the late John Kitkoski once told me, “If it fails the laws of physics and chemistry, become suspicious.  If it fails the laws of common sense as well, it would serve you better to move on and look elsewhere. Being the first to embrace a new idea isn’t worth very much if it later turns out to be false.”

Before 1995, bi-polar disorders were diagnosed in 0.1% of the population and were typically treated long-term by the trace mineral lithium.  When the FDA granted Abbott Laboratories license to sell the drug Depakote to treat people mania, a new disorder popped up which needed treatment.  Mood stabilization became the new marketing mantra used by drug companies ever since to sell drugs such as olanzapine, risperidone (Risperdal), quetiapine (Seoquel) and others.

Of course, .01% of the population is too small of a market so they had to increase the diagnosis of bi-polar disorders to include people who normally would not be considered in need of treatment.  The new DSM IV diagnoses for the disease upped the market to 5% of the population. The conferences and papers to back this increase were heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry but in reality, there are no randomized controlled trials that show that these drugs actually do better than placebo or no treatment at all.  How can this be allowed?  Is someone asleep at the regulatory wheel?  Or is it all about the Benjamins ($100 dollar bills and lots of them)?  Sorry Mr. Franklin, I think it’s about you.

The issue is also bigger than just the money being made; it is the issue of increased death rates among those using long-term antipsychotic medications.  When I was a kid, I remember going from what now would be considered a manic phase to a down phase many times during the day.  This is normal for developing children and has been for millennium.  Today, we deem it necessary to treat this normal condition because teachers and parents don’t want to deal with a typically active child.  Better to drug them than to deal with their energy.

What staggers me is that despite all of our supposed improvements in drug therapy, four times as many people are admitted to hospitals for bi-polar issues than 100 years ago. If it’s working, why are people getting worse?  Could it be that if a person stops taking the drug, the withdrawal symptoms are worse than the so-called disease was initially?  Pharmaceutical company’s profits are up and the mental health of our world is down.  Is this what we all really want?