St. John's Wort is ineffective for treating ADHD(????)

(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?

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.

How to discredit natural medicine
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.

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 as an excuse to simply say St. John's
Wort doesn't work for something.

Problems with the trial
Beyond the fatal problem of studying the effects of an inactivated
herb, 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?

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.

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.

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!

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 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

###

About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate with a
passion for teaching people how to improve their health He has
authored more than 1,500 articles and dozens of reports, guides and
interviews on natural health topics