- Let’s be honest about placebo | Ed Halliwell | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk — This guy is more tentative than I would be but I love any conversation about the wonders of placebo. Placebo is the core of our wonderful holistic nature…we have what we need to heal inside of us!
- BBC News – Would-be MP on depression battle — “All they offered were drugs & containment. There was no therapy at all.” Ah, the nature of psychiatric care in all the western world. It’s good to see it so blatantly exposed. We need more places like Soteria, which show much higher rates of recovery. And there is now one in Alaska.
- Blueberries and Kale Placed on Most Toxic List — Huffington Post — I’ve put the “dirty dozen” on this blog a couple of times. When one’s income is stretched it’s good to know what conventional foods are okay and what should never be eaten unless organic. The “dirty dozen” list of the 12 fruits and vegetables with the highest content of pesticides is published by the Environmental Working Group at their allied site http://www.foodnews.org. For years I have been recommending that my patients, friends and family use this list to choose which foods they should purchase organically. If you like to eat any of the dirty dozen, then these are the foods you should be using your “organic food budget” money to purchase, rather than using it for foods that are not high in insecticide content (they also list the “clean 15”). The classics that have been on the list for the last decade are still on there: strawberries, peaches, apples, celery, bell peppers, spinach, cherries, imported grapes and potatoes. But this year, two new ones made it onto the list: blueberries and kale. Kale is the first of the brassica family (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and kale) to hit the list. Many of its relatives have been on the “least toxic” list in the past, so this is quite surprising — as is the presence of one of my most favorite foods on the list: blueberries.
- “Unhinged: the Trouble with Psychiatry” AHRP Blog — Yes, Vera shares my feeling that Daniel Carlat does not begin to take the issues with psychiatry far enough. — Dr. Carlat is one of a small but growing number of mainstream psychiatrists in academia who are raising their voice against their profession for promoting profitable delusions about mental illness and its unsubstantiated chemical cures. What’s missing in this, and most books authored by psychiatrists, is the acknowledgment of a body of evidence demonstrating serious harm to patients that psychiatry’s industry-driven ministrations produce.
- Nemeroff enters the news again! Grassley Probes Nemeroff And University Of Miami — Pharmalot — The Charles Nemeroff affair encompasses more people all the time. Now, the University of Miami Medical School has become ensnared in the ongoing probe launched by US Senator Chuck Grassley, who investigated Nemeroff as part of an inquiry into undisclosed financial conflicts of interest among academic researchers who receive federal grants.