Friday Fungus: More about mushrooms and depression

A while ago I reported on the ongoing research showing that Psilocybe mushrooms have a beneficial impact on depressive conditions:

...the immediate effects of psilocybin are not as important for clinical benefit as the longer-term effects. That's because psilocybin increases the expression of genes and signalling proteins associated with nerve growth and connectivity, he says: "We think that the antidepressant effects of psilocybin may be due to a possible increase of factors that activate long-term neuroplasticity."

Now more evidence is coming to light about these beneficial effects:

Far from expanding your mind, the hallucinogenic chemical found in magic mushrooms induces widespread decreases in brain activity, researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Psilocybin has been revered for centuries for its ability to induce mystical experiences, and has potential therapeutic value for various psychiatric conditions. The drug is known to activate serotonin receptors, but how this produces its effects is little understood.

And this reduction in brain activity is what helps with depression:

Depression involves hyperactivity in the mPFC (medial prefrontal cortex), leading to the pessimistic outlook and pathological brooding characteristic of the condition, so mPFC deactivation could alleviate those symptoms.

Which all rather begs a question! Why, when these mushrooms have killed no-one, cause no long-term health problems and may even be beneficial, did the UK government make possession of them a criminal offence in 2005?

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Advertising isn't the cause of dodgy boob jobs - why ban it?

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Apparently the boob job industry is a pretty big one. And we have a scandal as thousands of women were given what turned out to be faulty implants. It would appear that (as is often the case) the fault isn't self-obsessed women and greedy doctors but advertising:

The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), which represents the top plastic surgeons, is urging ministers to impose the advertising ban as part of a crackdown on the multi-million pound cosmetic surgery industry. 

You see folks, BAAPS (an acronym of which Peter Simple would have been proud) don't advertise! Oh no, these men are more discrete. And advertising is queering their pitch:

Fazel Fatah, consultant plastic surgeon and BAAPS president, said: "In no other area of surgery would one encounter Christmas vouchers and two-for-one offers.

"No other kind of surgery is advertised. You don't see adverts for metal hip replacements or gall bladder operations. Advertising in cosmetic surgery feeds into the worries and insecurities in a group of vulnerable people."

So rather than working gently through the euphemisms of the the medical profession's market-fix on cosmetic surgery, women are buying from bright and shiny advertising. The problem is that the fault doesn't lie with the advertising, it lies with the doctors (and trust me, folks, the men doing the operations on those "dodgy" clinics are doctors) who prefer making cash to selling a safe product.

However, Fazel Fatah really isn't any different - rather than have an open accessible market for what is (in all but a few cases) a luxury, this surgeon wants a world where cosmetic surgery isn't advertised. One wonders why given that Mr Fatah works for a profit-making cosmetic surgery business?

Is it because such controls reduce access to the market and allow the 40% of cosmetic surgeons who belong to BAAPS to charge higher prices, prevent new entrants to a lucrative market and corner the market for medical rather than aesthetic work?

Advertising isn't the problem - even tacky post-divorce promotions or two for the price of one offers. The problem is that some people thought it OK to offer lower quality products and no-one was checking on this or ensuring the customer had the information she needs.

But then that wouldn't suit Mr Fatah's business now would it?

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Trust me, I'm a politician!

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Trust is a tricky old thing – that headline probably brings out the sense of irony in you (although you don’t know for sure whether or not I actually mean “trust me”). Indeed our default position is, as Martin Vander Weyer points out, more often distrust:

...trust is no longer offered, in any sphere, as it used to be; distrust is now the default response. It’s easy to argue that business leaders, especially in the City, have brought this on themselves by behaving greedily and uncaringly. But that’s not the whole story, which is also about social change.

At the core of this is a presiding sense that they’re out to rip us off. Politicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists – the entire panoply of professions – are cynical, driven by personal success rather than by any concept of service. And our mistrust extends further – we see train drivers striking on boxing day and see self-interest rather than a collective response to injustice, we tell tales or teachers or council officers seeing the “strike day” as an excuse for a jolly and we’ve got used to anger at huge bonuses in large firms and big public organisation that seem merely to reward failure or incompetence.

The other day, Jack of Kent pondered on why everyone hates lawyers and concludes that it is the majesty of the law that we fear rather than its agent, the lawyer:

It is perhaps not so much that lawyers are hated, but that law itself is feared and mysterious.

That this is the case is unfortunate, and it is an entirely fair criticism that many lawyers do not do more to promote the public understanding of law.

Of course, barriers to lay understanding can suit the interests of lawyers. Lawyers have no general interest in enabling potential clients to work out their own legal problems.

And, so to that extent, lawyers really only have themselves to blame.

But it isn’t quite so simple – what has happened is that we have stopped trusting lawyers because they are lawyers, doctors simply for the fact of their doctoring and politicians by dint of their elected authority. The brands of these professions are corrupted by our awareness of their failings, our recognition that lawyers, doctors, MPs and other ‘professionals’ will close ranks, will protect their privileges, rather than have those failings exposed.

This is a good thing although we still give too great a credence to the self-interest of the Law Society, the BMA or the ‘senior backbencher’. However the growing doubt as to motive means that trust must be earned. It’s perfectly possible to trust a lawyer, a doctor, even a politician but only in so far as we trust the individual behind the badge.

When I urge you to trust me because I’m a politician, I’m asking you to trust the idea of such a person rather than to trust me. Such heuristics damage society by granting to a given organisation, professional body or political party the power to bestow trust.

You should trust Simon Cooke because he has proven himself trustworthy not because he has the stamp of politician.

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New Puritans aren't all saints...

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Prompted by a comment on an earlier post:

Please note that professor Nutt has a patent for an alcohol replacement drink which is based on Valium. 

I looked into this...

An alcohol substitute that gives the drinker the pleasant feelings of tipsiness without an unpleasant hangover, is being developed by researchers.

The team, led by drugs expert Professor David Nutt, has developed the drink using chemicals related to the sedative Valium.

It works on the nerves in a similar way to alcohol causing feelings of well-being and relaxation.

I didn't see the press release but, judging by the report - and the focus on the 'hangover' - it seems to me that Professor Nutt might be focusing on the dollars rather than the health benefits!

And - in Professor Nutt's terms - Valium is really addictive:

Valium depresses the nervous system much like alcohol and is abused by all segments of society. Valium is both physically and psychologically addicting and as is considered one of the toughest addictions to break. With chronic use, its abuse potential is high. Withdrawal symptoms can be seen after only 2 or 3 days of repeated use. 

So we replace a drug produced by businesses that don't sponsor medical research with a drug produced by businesses that do sponsor medical research?

I'm sticking with the beer, Professor!

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Another cash cow for doctors to trough on!

It seems that that those who run the NHS are either rent-seeking doctors or else idiots (I'll leave you to choose):

From next year, GPs will receive a payment for every obese patient they advise to lose weight - on top of money for keeping lists of those who weigh too much. 

That's right dear reader, next time you toddle along to see your locla quack you'll be told you're a little chubby and to lose weight. You hear the sound of doctors' wallets fattening nicely there, don't you?

Even the nannying fussbuckets think this is crackers - here's Tam Fry from the National Obesity Forum:

“I am in favour of GPs referring more patients to weight management schemes, like Weight Watchers and Slimming World, where there is good evidence they work, as there increasingly is. But I think it’s appalling that GPs need to be paid extra to do this - and even worse that they can get the same reward just from telling a patient to lose some weight.” 

You really have to hand it to the BMA. Probably the most successful trade union of the lot - even Bob Crow must look on in awe as they continue to feather their members nests with taxpayers' cash while pretending to be a body concerned only with the betterment of health

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"There's a pill for that" - Big Pharma and the medicalisation of society's ills

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Dr Petra tweeted this article from The Drum about the medicalisation of low libido in women and, more significantly, the manner in which drug companies mis-use research to provide supposed evidence for their products.

However, this article in The Drum shows how the companies take a further step:

Virtually unheard of not so long back, FSD burst onto the global stage in 1999, with bizarre but widely trumpeted claims it affected 43 percent of women. Viagra had just been approved for men, and as sales soared, the fantasies of pharmaceutical executives soon turned to a similar mass market among women.

Sex researchers, for a long time locked outside the hallowed halls of the health establishment, were suddenly inundated with offers of fine food, flattery and funding, from the friendly folks in pharma, and a new science of sexual medicine was born. Over the next 10 years companies with obligations to shareholders to widen the numbers of people defined as sick, and narrow the solutions offered to them, would not just sponsor the science of FSD, on occasions they would actually help to create it.

Corporate staff would participate in scientific conferences where the uncertain nature of FSD was hotly debated; companies would orchestrate surveys to prove how widespread sexual problems were; and perhaps most chillingly, company employees would help design the diagnostic tools used to label otherwise healthy women as disordered, opening the pathway to long-term treatment with costly and potentially harmful medicines.

And at the centre of all this sponsored science was the special long-term relationship between a small circle of senior researchers and a powerful industry whose sales are approaching a trillion dollars a year. In 2000, when a key definition of FSD was published - with claims it affected up to one in every two women - 18 of the 19 'thought leaders' who wrote it had financial ties to a total of more than 20 companies.

This process seems eerily familiar to those who have studied the medicalisation of smoking (or rather nicotine replacement therapies and drugs). First identify a real problem such as that smoking increases cancer risks or that some women have lower levels of sexual drive and then turn that problem into one with a medical solution. This is achieved by the subborning of researchers and, if this isn't always possible, setting up front organisations or even conducting your own 'research'.

More recently it's been the turn of the German drug company Boehringer Ingelheim to construct this science, its paid consultants 'educating' doctors, its staff helping produce yet another survey finding widespread suffering, and employees helping design the tools to diagnose the condition. The Decreased Sexual Desire Screener is a simple five-item questionnaire, launched last year by the company as a 'new, easy to use' diagnostic tool to assess women with HSDD - the target condition for the company's experimental sex drug, a failed anti-depressant which affects the brain's chemistry. That's right … a drug company is helping to design a diagnostic instrument to label women with a disorder, so they can qualify for that same company's drug

We really should be very concerned that pharmaceutical companies, aided and abetted by governments and by the medical establisment are activiely seeking to medicalise all society's ills - smoking, drinking, not enough (or too much) sex, eating too much or too little, not exercising enough and all the regular depressive conditions that come with life's downs.

As someone once said: "there's a pill for that!"

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Friday Fungus: Coming to a mushroom blog near you in 2010!

I do hope you’ve enjoyed the Friday Fungus over the past few months – it’s a little bit silly but I hope has provided a little smile, a bit of information and some great ways to eat the little darlings. For this New Year’s Day Friday Fungus I’m simply whetting you appetite for what is to come!

1. More on mushrooms in medicine – both the silly “mushrooms cure cancer” stuff and the more serious application of fungal origin drugs to treating diseases like Parkinson’s

2. An occasional exploration of the cultural significance of mushrooms – from Italian Feste and Native American drugs to why we eat mushrooms for breakfast

3. Assorted recipes – including, when the time is ripe, spring mushrooms, mushrooms in salads and possibly some experiments with mushroom desserts

Enjoy reading, love eating and if you’ve any desires or suggestions mushroom-wise please let me know and we’ll add them in. Got 52 Friday Fungus to do in 2010!

Happy New Year!

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