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Stop Depression
Now:
available from
Amazon.com
and Chapters.indigo.ca
Reviewed by SYD BAUMEL SADLY, the over-the-top subtitle says it all. How ironic that a natural health writer like myself who has written about this "breakthrough supplement" for years should now feel compelled to caution that these hotheaded mainstream authorities are hyping it so feverishly you'd think they own shares in Nature Made. Nature Made is the company that, about the same time this book was published in the spring of 1999, introduced to the North American market a chemically stable, clinically proven, oral form of SAM-e (pronounced Sammy or Sam E., short for s-adenosylmethionine)—a biochemical Italian doctors have been prescribing for depression and other conditions since the 1970s. SAM-e is completely natural (we make several grams a day from the dietary amino acid, methionine), but it costs much more than even the flashiest new antidepressant drugs—about $3 to $10 a day for the usual dosage. Richard Brown, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, Teodoro Bottiglieri, a prominent expert on SAM-e from Baylor University, and health writer Carol Colman try so hard to make readers believe SAM-e is the Second Coming and worth every PEN-e (without once, I believe, mentioning how many pennies it costs) that they make even me squirm. Fortunately, once you get past the hype on the cover, the jacket, and even through the first chapter, the authors get real. Yes, there are side effects (occasional triggering of mania or hypomania—especially in people with bipolar disorder—is the most significant). And "working as well as prescription drugs" only means SAM-e helps about 70 percent of users, bringing full recovery to half as many. Does it really work "in half the time"? Brown et al. don't mention that SAM-e only did so in the studies where it was injected. In the far fewer controlled trials of oral SAM-e, it worked about as slowly as drugs. Nevertheless, in Brown's practice—and in accounts by some users on the Internet—oral SAM-e has usually seemed to energize and uplift depressives within a few days to a couple of weeks—when it works. HYP-e packaging and window-dressing aside, for less than the price of a box of Nature Made SAM-e, this is a good book should you want to give SAM-e a TRY-e. It even has generous advice on other natural treatments for depression, all of them much cheaper and (for some people) more effective than SAM-e. order it from Amazon.com or Chapters.indigo.ca |
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