NaturalNews.com
Originally published June 13 2008

Flawed St. John's Wort Study on ADHD Failed to Use Active Form of
Herbal Extract
by Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) 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-mong...

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

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