The UltraMind Solution (8 page)

Have you ever felt angry and irritable because you have been deprived of sleep? Have you felt happier and that you had fewer problems after a great night’s sleep?

Have you ever had the flu and tried to focus and read a book or
concentrate on anything only to find it difficult, perhaps even impossible?

Have you ever hallucinated or been delirious with a high fever?

These are basic examples of the body-mind connection that many of us have experienced. But there are so many other things that occur inside of you that affect your brain and mind of which you have no awareness.

Did you know that premenstrual mood swings are the result of fluctuating hormone levels, or that your winter blues are the result of vitamin D deficiency, or that your lifelong melancholy may be the result of mercury poisoning from hundreds of tuna fish sandwiches you’ve eaten over your lifetime, or that your obsessive-compulsive disorder could be the result of a bacterial infection?

These obvious and not so obvious interactions between your body and your mind are only the tip of the iceberg.

Consider for a moment that depression, anxiety, insomnia, attention deficit disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder—not to mention the hundreds of other mental disorders described by psychiatrists in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
DSM-IV
)—may be primarily caused by imbalances in the body and have very little to do with the meaning, metaphors, and myths we associated with them. It is a perfect system for describing your symptoms, but useless for helping you find the cause.

Interestingly, there are a few conditions recognized and treated by conventional medicine that clearly show how problems in your body cause “diseases” in your brain, but the implications are ignored.

For example, when someone with late-stage liver disease develops something called “hepatic encephalopathy” or temporary insanity from liver failure, the treatment is not antipsychotics, but antibiotics to clear out the bacteria in the intestine, which produce brain-destroying toxins that can no longer be detoxified by the liver.

Imagine, treating insanity with antibiotics.

Similarly, we know that alcoholics become “crazy” with a condition known as Wernicke’s encephalopathy from vitamin B
₁
(or thiamine) deficiency, which can be cured by giving them a vitamin.

And we know that an antibiotic for a streptococcal infection can cure some children who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. The condition is called PANDAS or Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections.

Yet physicians typically don’t stop to consider whether or not other mental disorders may be related to imbalances in gut function, the immune system, problems with detoxification, or an imbalance in any of the body’s other key systems.

I think this is because doctors tend to see what they believe and often don’t believe what they see, even when it is right in front of them.

What happens in the body influences the brain, as we never imagined it could. The implications for treatment of mental and brain disorders are staggering. A whole new array of possible causes and treatments are open to us.

Changing your diet, nutrient levels, circadian rhythms or sleep patterns, the substances you use, the amount of exercise or playtime you have, getting rid of toxins in your system, balancing your hormones, correcting imbalances in your digestive tract, boosting your cells’ ability to produce energy, and fixing food sensitivities or allergies can
all
radically transform your mood and brain function.

With that in mind, consider the following:

Can lifelong depression be cured?

Can children completely recover from autism?

Can dementia be reversed?

Conventional medical wisdom says no. We don’t see many cases in the medical literature where people recover from autism, reverse dementia, or are cured from lifelong depression.

But just because psychiatrists and neurologists aren’t reporting dramatic recoveries like these employing the “normal” methods used to treat such disorders doesn’t mean the disorders aren’t treatable. In conventional approaches, partial relief of symptoms is sometimes possible. But cures or dramatic recoveries? You may hear doctors say,
Where is the evidence?

The idea that psychiatric or neurological “diseases” like depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia can be effectively treated, not by administering psychoactive medication, but by altering dietary and lifestyle influences and repairing the body’s systems, which affect the entire Body-Mind System in which the brain functions, is resisted by conventional psychiatry and neurology.

The forces that distort our view, and keep conventional doctors locked in their way of seeing and thinking, are complex. One factor is the enormous influence drug companies have by way of funding and setting the
research agenda, developing treatments, withholding important data that contradicts their worldview, controlling medical education, “educating” doctors, and marketing to consumers.

Other factors are our medical institutions and our financial reimbursement systems, which are founded on outdated ideas of separate diseases and medical specialties. Abandoning those ideas would threaten their economic viability and perhaps even their existence.

And our medical training reinforces the illusion of separate body systems by training doctors in specialties and subspecialties—there are doctors for every inch of your body. But there are very few who understand how the whole body works as one complete ecosystem.

Even when we see research or miracles in practice (dismissed as spontaneous remissions) that contradict our worldview, it is very difficult to integrate. It is ignored or brushed aside in favor of our current paradigm. In fourteenth-century Europe it would have been very hard to convince anyone that the world is round. It looks flat so it must be flat. Similarly, doctors today can’t see what is quickly becoming obvious.

I recently presented a lecture at Harvard outlining the case of a boy who recovered from autism using the approach in
The UltraMind Solution.
I documented in great detail his story, and showed how when his abnormal tests and biology returned to normal, his brain and behavior stabilized, and he lost his diagnosis of autism.

The pediatrician present explained away his recovery as an example of spontaneous remission. One of the other physicians at the lecture, who knew my work, said facetiously, “The only problem is that Dr. Hyman has twelve cases like this of ‘spontaneous remission’ in his practice.”

Unfortunately, too many doctors have the same mind-set as that pediatrician: don’t confuse me with the facts. My mind is made up.

Nevertheless, the recent discoveries about how behavior, mood, and mental functioning are linked to our biology are one of the greatest advances in twenty-first-century medicine. These discoveries are growing to meet other advances, which show how our thoughts, feelings, and life experiences literally shape our brain and influence our biology.

Such research holds the answer to the epidemic of mood, behavior, attention, and memory problems that are rampant in today’s society.

What I am suggesting in this book is a revolutionary new method for treating broken brains—“mental disorders” and “brain diseases”—that is based on cutting-edge science and medicine; one that marks a radical departure from classical psychiatry and neurology and the methods these fields typically use to treat their patients.

The brain is not disconnected from the rest of the body as many practitioners of conventional medicine would have you believe, and the solution to the epidemic of broken brains is
not
found in more psychoactive medications or better therapy.

The brain is mostly downstream from the real causes, which are found in the biology of your whole body. Brain problems or “disorders” are almost always systemic disorders, and the cure will be found outside the brain—in your body.