works with healthcare providers to develop Targeted Amino Acid Therapy (TAAT™) protocols designed to address the spectrum of neurotransmitter and hormone imbalances. Here’s what would have happened next:īased on the laboratory results, NeuroScience, Inc. The psychiatrist would have chosen those tests based on prompting by NeuroScience itself. If my friend’s daughter had followed her psychiatrist’s recommendation, she would have sent her saliva and urine samples to a company called NeuroScience, which would have had them tested for certain hormones and neurotransmitters. We’ll discuss that below, but first let’s look more closely at the psychiatrist’s recommendations to my friend’s daughter and at other examples of bogus tests. To the untrained eye these laboratories appear to be legitimate, even to the point of their being approved by apparently legitimate certifying bodies. A topic that we haven’t much featured on SBM (we touched upon it here, here and here, and probably elsewhere) is that of bogus laboratory or other diagnostic tests.Įarly in my own education in modern quackery, I found it particularly distasteful not merely that quacks misuse laboratory tests, but that several commercial laboratories market misleading tests. Clinical pathology is the medical specialty that concerns itself, in summary, with laboratory tests-their development, their validity, their interpretation, their usefulness and, by implication, their misuse. In that, she was entirely justified.ĭuring our recent panel discussion at the NECSS, a member of the audience identified himself as a clinical pathologist at a major medical center, and wondered what he might do to become involved in the good fight against encroaching pseudoscience in medical schools. According to the psychiatrist, who had an academic appointment at a medical school in New York City, “I have been using these supplements with a great deal of success.” My friend is not medically or scientifically sophisticated, but this made her a little uncomfortable. The psychiatrist had recommended testing samples of saliva and urine for hormone and neurotransmitter levels, the results of which would likely indicate a need for supplements to correct deficiencies or imbalances. A few years ago a friend asked me to comment on advice given to her adult daughter by a psychiatrist whom she’d consulted for depression.
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