The UltraMind Solution (15 page)

This leaves the public very vulnerable. Doctors are using the only tools they know how to use, but that’s the way they get into trouble.

Unfortunately, it appears that drug companies often see any backlash or lawsuits as simply part of their “research and development” expenses of their drugs.

Bloomberg News reported in December 2006:

Nationwide, several lawsuits accuse drug companies of engaging in deceptive marketing by overstating the effectiveness and understating the risks of newer antipsychotics. The suits also claim companies promoted the drugs for unapproved uses
.
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska and West Virginia sued Eli Lilly & Co. this year on behalf of their Medicaid health programs for the poor. They said the company fraudulently touted the antipsychotic Zyprexa for unapproved uses. Indianapolis-based Lilly settled about eight thousand personal-injury complaints for $700 million in 2005 and faces four thousand more claims.

We are a drug-addicted society, and we are overprescribed medication when there are better solutions. According to
The Journal of the American Medical Association,
in an average week 81 percent of Americans use at least one medication, 50 percent take at least one prescription drug, and 7 percent take five or more drugs. Of those over sixty-five years old, 12 percent take at least ten medications and 23 percent take at least five medications.
¹³

This bias toward medication sadly distracts us from finding the real or best answers to our ailments.

Unfortunately, the billions of dollars that pour into the pharmaceutical industry every year are not spent researching or promoting changes in diet, nutrient therapies, detoxification, addressing food allergies, and other potentially beneficial treatments. Instead, our economy thrives on products and services that make us sick or benefit from our illness (drugs, processed foods, fast foods, and companies that thrive by adding to our environmental toxic load).

Who knows where we would be if such research were being done.

The next frontier in medicine, psychiatry, and neurology is realizing that depression is not a Prozac deficiency, ADHD is not a Ritalin deficiency, and schizophrenia is not a Zyprexa deficiency.

We have the tools and knowledge now to make an enormous difference in this epidemic of mental and brain disorders by looking deeper and thinking differently.

Getting off medications can be difficult, comes with certain risks, and must be done under a physician’s supervision.
I don’t recommend anyone stop using their medications suddenly, but I do suggest that by following the plan to optimize your brain function and address the underlying causes of mood disorders and brain dysfunction in
The UltraMind
Solution,
many people can get off their medications with their physician’s help and feel better and healthier than ever.

Fix your body and you will fix your brain.

We must all learn to deal with the infestation of ANTS in our brains if we want to be happy. The ANTS are “automatic negative thoughts,” or our beliefs, attitudes, and ways of thinking and being that move us away from well-being. Counseling, therapy, coaching, cognitive behavioral therapy, and even psychoanalysis can be essential components of an overall plan for mental health.

But if you are mercury poisoned, or deficient in folic acid, or have lowthyroid function, or drink twelve cups of coffee a day, or eat half a pound of sugar a day (the amount consumed by the average American), or have an inflamed brain from eating gluten, it is very difficult to talk or meditate your way out of your suffering.

I believe you must address the biological causes of the problems
first
before psychotherapy can be effective. Fix your biology. Then get psychotherapy and do your soul work.

Addressing the underlying imbalances in your body that cause brain dysfunction will allow you to venture more deeply and successfully into the exploration of your mind and your soul.

We all want to fully wake up, be happy, and completely feel the joys and pleasures of love, work, and play that give life its meaning and purpose.

But we can achieve that only by working on both our biology and our biography!

We can use the best of psychoemotional and behavioral therapies, but we
must
optimize brain function through improving nutrition; stabilizing immune function, hormone, and neurotransmitter balance; enhancing detoxification; normalizing digestive function; and boosting the energy in our cells.

The idea that the brain and the body are separated is a solid, well-established belief. All doctors are trained in the absolute nature of the
blood–brain barrier—a wall of tightly packed cells lining the smallest blood vessels of the brain, called capillaries, and a back-up defensive team of astrocytes (star-shaped cells of the glia) that holds this tightly packed wall together.

This barrier is designed to keep out toxic influences and infections, but let metabolically necessary ingredients like sugars, fatty acids, and amino acids through.

Because we know this barrier exists, we believe that what happens in the brain stays in the brain and what happens in the body stays in the body. Like an iron curtain, that barrier is never breached.

There is only one problem with this theory.

The blood–brain barrier is really just a partial barrier.

We now know the brain can become leaky and the barrier permeable under many conditions—poor nutrition, stress, infection, digestive imbalances, toxic injury, and allergy. The brain, in fact, reads what is happening in the rest of the body even under normal conditions of life.

What you do to your body you do to your brain.

Let’s take a brief look at childhood autism and Alzheimer’s to illustrate the frailty of the myth that the brain is walled off from the body.

Dr. Martha Herbert is an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the director of TRANSCEND (Treatment, Research, and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). Her work in autism is paradigm-shifting scientific research and thinking.

Rather than ignoring the almost universal
physical
complaints found in autistic children, most of which have been described in the scientific literature since the 1940s, she explains how they could be at the root of the brain and behavioral symptoms found in autistic children.

In her groundbreaking article in
Clinical Neuropsychiatry
entitled “Autism: A brain disorder, or a disorder that affects the brain?”
¹⁴
she explains how the incoherent brain connections found in children with autism, which show up as the inability to talk, connect with other people, or produce odd repetitive behaviors, have their root
not
in the brain but in problems with the digestive system and the immune system.

These breakdowns in the body, which lead to behavioral problems, occur because of genetic susceptibilities, which are amplified by environmental stresses and toxins.

Why, she asks, do 95 to 100 percent of autistic children have gastrointestinal
dysfunction, or 70 percent of them have immune system abnormalities? After examining all the accumulated research on autism, including her own work on brain imaging and the structure and function of the brain in autistic children, she concludes that autism is
not
a brain disorder, but a
systemic
disorder that affects the brain.

In fact, she challenges the idea that there is only one kind of autism. She says there may be many “autisms,” because each child has unique genetic and environmental factors that can lead to the same symptoms and behaviors. (This goes back to the myth of the diagnosis—having the name of the problem doesn’t tell you about the cause or causes.)

Dr. Herbert noticed that brains of autistic children are bigger, swollen perhaps. These swollen brains are filled with activated immune cells and inflammatory molecules.
¹⁵
Where is this inflammation coming from?

It starts outside the brain.

She describes autism as a “metabolic encephalopathy.” In nonmedical language that means that all the information and noise from outside the brain—from the gut, from the immune system, and from toxins—are causing the brain to malfunction.

This is a 180-degree turn from conventional thinking. If an altered response to a microbe or bug in the body by the immune system can affect brain function, or if a molecule made in the gut can change behavior or perception, then of course the brain is in communication with the rest of the body.

With autism we see clearly the effects of systemic imbalances in the body on the brain and mind. And what holds true of autism holds true of brain disorders like depression, Alzheimer’s, and a host of others as well.

Also out of Harvard is the work of pioneering neurologist Dennis Selkoe,
¹⁶
who has linked sugar and its ability to create insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome (or prediabetes), and diabetes to Alzheimer’s disease.

In fact, some researchers are calling Alzheimer’s “type 3” diabetes. People with type 2 diabetes have four times the risk of getting Alzheimer’s compared to those without diabetes.

We will explore this connection between diabetes and Alzheimer’s a little later in Part II when I discuss hormonal imbalances, but the take-home message here is that our diet, the sugar and processed food we eat, has a clear effect on our brain.

If your brain was walled off from the rest of your body, then how could this happen? The answer is that your brain is not walled off, and is in fact intimately connected to everything else going on in your body.