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1 " Physicians do not systematically prescribe placebos to their patients. Hence they have no way of comparing the effects of the drugs they prescribe to placebos. When they prescribe a treatment and it works, their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment. But there are thousands of treatments that have worked in clinical practice throughout history. Powdered stone worked. So did lizard's blood, and crocodile dung, and pig's teeth and dolphin's genitalia and frog's sperm. Patients have been given just about every ingestible - though often indigestible - substance imaginable. They have been 'purged, puked, poisoned, sweated, and shocked', and if these treatments did not kill them, they may have made them better. "
― , The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
2 " The Blue Mind Rx StatementOur wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans.The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters.Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more.Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety.We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies.•Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits.•All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy.•Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both.•Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support.•Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water. "
3 " A child's behavior we see on the surface is the reflection of the feelings that are rooted underneath. We can use topical treatments to try to shape what the behavior looks like, but if we really want things to change, we need to address the roots. Nourish the roots, see the growth. "
― Kelly Bartlett
4 " It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum. "
― J. Craig Venter
5 " Like antidepressants, a substantial part of the benefit of psychotherapy depends on a placebo effect, or as Moerman calls it, the meaning response. At least part of the improvement that is produced by these treatments is due to the relationship between the therapist and the client and to the client's expectancy of getting better. That is a problem for antidepressant treatment. It is a problem because drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry, not because of the psychological factors. But it is not a problem for psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are trained to provide a warm and caring environment in which therapeutic change can take place. Their intention is to replace the hopelessness of depression with a sense of hope and faith in the future. These tasks are part of the essence of psychotherapy. The fact that psychotherapy can mobilize the meaning response - and that it can do so without deception - is one of its strengths, no one of its weaknesses. Because hopelessness is a fundamental characteristic of depression, instilling hope is a specific treatment for it it. Invoking the meaning response is essential for the effective treatment of depression, and the best treatments are those that can do this most effectively and that can do without deception. "
6 " For people who are depressed, and especially for those who do not receive enough benefit from medication of for whom the side effects of antidepressants are troubling, the fact that placebos can duplicate much of the effects of antidepressants should be taken as good news. It means that there are other ways of alleviating depression. As we have seen, treatments like psychotherapy and physical exercise are at least as effective as antidepressant drugs and more effective than placebos. In particular, CBT has been shown to lower the risk of relapsing into depression for years after treatment has ended, making it particularly cost effective. "
7 " One reason we're not winning the fight against depression is that our available treatments leave so many in partial recovery limbo. "
― , The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
8 " Although it is important to be able to recognise and disclose symptom of physical illnesses or injury, you need to be more careful about revealing psychiatric symptoms. Unless you know that your doctor understands trauma symptoms, including dissociation, you are wise not to reveal too much. Too many medical professionals, including psychiatrists, believe that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia, that mood swings mean bipolar disorder which has to be medicated, and that depression requires electro-convulsive therapy if medication does not relieve it sufficiently. The “medical model” simply does not work for dissociation, and many treatments can do more harm than good... You do not have to tell someone everything just because he is she is a doctor. However, if you have a therapist, even a psychiatrist, who does understand, you need to encourage your parts to be honest with that person. Then you can get appropriate help. "
― Alison Miller , Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
9 " It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam's rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve. "
― Bertrand Russell ,
10 " The great thing about Ayurveda is that its treatments always yield side benefits, not side effects. "
― , Essential Ayurveda: What It Is and What It Can Do for You
11 " Is autism a disease?If a woman asked me right now, “but wouldn’t you rather be cured?” I’d reply, “would you like to be cured of being a woman?”Autism, like womanhood, is painful, and difficult, and not made easy by the structure of our society. But it is who we are.There are treatments that can make certain aspects easier, yes. But there is no whole cure because there is no whole disease.Some women take birth control to reduce the effects of PMS or PMDD, to stop their bodies from being so at odds with the world, to make living just a little more easy, a little more comfortable. But it is not for every woman, it does not change the fact that they are a woman, and it does not change the sexism that they face every day, all the problems that result from the fact of society being built to serve people who are not them.I’d like treatments for autistic people to be seen in the same light. Medicine’s priority should be to improve quality of life, not to make a person more palatable to society.Society must be forced to deal with these people because these people will not be easily consigned to oblivion. "
― Irene Wendy Wode
12 " Currently, there is no cure for MS, but there are treatments that modify disease activity, slow the course of the disease, and alleviate its effects. "
― , Multiple Sclerosis: A Self Care Guide to Wellness
13 " Tempting as it may be to draw one conclusion or another from my story and universalize it to apply to another's experience, it is not my intention for my book to be seen as some sort of cookie-cutter approach and explanation of mental illness, It is not ab advocacy of any particular form of therapy over another. Nor is it meant to take sides in the legitimate and necessary debate within the mental health profession if which treatments are most effective for this or any other mental illness. What it is, I hope, is a way for readers to get a true feel for what it's like to be in the grips of mental illness and what it's like to strive for recovery. "
― , Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
14 " Recall Marx’s fundamental insight about the “bourgeois” limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities (“exploitation”) are not the “unprincipled violations of the principle of equality,” but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the wearisome old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact in the market; the crucial moment of Marx’s critique of “bourgeois” socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of “unequal” exchange between the worker and the capitalist—this exchange is fully equal and “just,” ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labor-power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to counteract it is through a direct “terroristic imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal access to health services…), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments for the underprivileged). In short, the axiom of equality” means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce “terroristic” equality)— it is a formalistic notion in a strict dialectical sense, that is, its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form. "
― Slavoj Žižek , In Defense of Lost Causes
15 " You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. "
― Atul Gawande , Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
16 " I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution. "
― Temple Grandin , Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism
17 " Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination. "
― Michel Foucault , The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
18 " Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered. "
― Bessel van der Kolk , The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
19 " The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy. "
― Andreas Moritz , Cancer Is Not a Disease - It's a Survival Mechanism
20 " Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor. "
― Simon Singh , Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine
