Blogging with Lee

Rethinking Mental Healthcare

Our friends over at iHealthTube just posted a new video interview with Dr. Gary Kohls, a former physician I’ve written about on a few occasions in this blog. Dr. Kohls retired from practice recently and now works tirelessly as a mental health advocate and educator. iHealthTube has dozens of videos featuring Dr. Kohls. This most recent post addresses nutrition as it relates to the brain.

 

I met Dr. Kohls about a year and a half ago and have come to respect and admire his veracity and his willingness to stand up against the conventions of modern mental healthcare. Through his practice he has helped countless individuals put an end to the damaging effects of mainstream therapies using natural strategies, demonstrating conclusively that there are safer and healthier options for addressing mental health.

 

In the brief time that I’ve known him, I’ve come to find that Dr. Kohls is not alone in his belief that mainstream practices and “medicalization” of mental healthcare may be doing more harm than good.

 

The other night I turned on my local PBS station and saw another man I’ve admired over the years, Dr. James Gordon, presenting a program based on his book Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression. As the founder and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Dr. Gordon has been instrumental in establishing a scientific foundation for integrative healthcare that acknowledges the profound connection between our minds and our bodies, our mental health and our physical wellness.

 

iHealthTube also has some interviews with Dr. Timothy Scott, author of the book America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived. As a psychology professor, Dr. Scott dedicated over 20 years to investigating medical research as it relates to psychology. He states that the research supporting the use of antidepressants is flawed, poorly designed and biased, most often paid for and conducted by the drug companies themselves. Like Dr. Kohls and Dr. Gordon, he is selfless in his pursuit to share his knowledge: all proceeds of his excellent book are donated to charity.

 

Mental healthcare has become a hotbutton issue in the healthcare reform debate. It’s a rising concern for millions of Americans young and old, as it’s virtually impossible to find someone who hasn’t been affected by it either personally or through family and friends. I hope you will join me in my support for these courageous men who are leading the charge to bring attention to this growing field of healthcare and are influencing positive changes in the way our current system addresses our most valuable asset—our minds.

Nutrition and Behavior

Swanson customer turned colleague Dr. Gary Kohls recently presented a lecture here in Fargo on the role of nutrition and supplementation in mental health care. An expert in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who focuses his practice on re-establishing sound mental health through natural means, Dr. Kohls expresses great concern for the youth of today.

"The Columbine shootings, the Red Lake shootings--if you look at all the school violence in recent years you will find that the perpetrators were troubled individuals who, unfortunately in most cases, were being treated with potentially harmful pharmaceuticals that deprive the brain of basic nutrients and interfere with normal healthy functioning and development," says Dr. Kohls.

He believes that through proper counseling, healthy eating and nutritional supplementation, we can essentially "feed" our brains in a manner that helps naturally stabilize and support healthy mental function, modulate and maintain mood and even influence physical energy and comfort.

These ideas mesh perfectly with those of another friend and colleague, Alex Schauss, Ph.D., FACN, who published a landmark text on the subject in 1980 entitled Diet, Crime and Deliquency. The book, reprinted 14 times in just a decade (now, unfortunately, out of print), expanded on and distilled the scholarly work he originally published two years earlier in a study titled Orthomolecular Treatment of Criminal Offenders.

Since that early work, more than 20 controlled clinical trials conducted in both juvenile and adult institutions have suggested that diet and nutrition could, in fact, be used to help reduce antisocial behavior. Now, 30 years after Dr. Schauss's initial work on the subject, the medical community is finally embracing the concept.

This month we received news that the United Kingdom's largest medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, is funding a large new trial to investigate which dietary supplements may be beneficial beyond what is possible by diet alone. Researchers will study over 1,000 patients in three UK prisons.

"Seeing the level of research on diet and crime reach this level of financial support by the medical community is heartening," Dr. Schauss recently told a nutrition industry reporter. "But it took over 30 years, even though the evidence was there back in the 1970s." I agree that it's been a longtime coming, but I'm encouraged by the scope and the prominence of the new study.

Dr. Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, told the same industry reporter, "If this study shows that nutritional supplementation affects behavior, it could have profound significance for nutrition guidelines not only within the criminal justice system, but in the wider community, in schools, for example." And that brings us full circle to Dr. Kohls' concern for today's youth.

Could it be that our modern Western diets--full of empty calories, sugars, preservatives and other chemicalss--are not just making our kids fat, but predisposing them to behavior problems as well? Are all these new drugs--psychostimulants, antidepressants, etc.--only exacerbating the problem by causing further nturitional and functional disruption?

Dr. Kohls and others are asking these very questions, but nobody in the medical establishment seems willing to provide an answer. Hopefully this ambitious new research will help raise awareness and increase interest in such "radical" ideas. The world deserves for this concept to be taken seriously--the fate of our children and the future of our society are at stake.

Customer Profile: Gary Kohls, MD

Lots of companies pay lip service to their customers, but at Swanson Health Products, we mean it when we say it is you, our customers, who make our company succeed. My father always had great personal interest in his customers and he passed that commitment down as a basic foundation on which this company stands.

This week I had the opportunity to sit down with one of our longtime customers, Dr. Gary Kohls of Duluth, Minnesota. Dr. Kohls made the six-hour journey from Duluth to Fargo just to visit our facilities and see first-hand where the products he routinely recommends to his clients originate.

I want to take this opportunity to thank him publicly for his interest in Swanson Health Products, his patronage over the years and, most of all, for the great service he provides the community of Duluth and surrounding areas.

You see, Dr. Kohls is not your average family physician. He spent many years working in the rural areas of Northern Minnesota, where many small communities exist up to an hour or more away from a hospital or treatment center of any kind. That in itself is challenging and laudable work, but for Dr. Kohls it was just the beginning.

After “burning out” on rural medicine (Imagine working 19 hour days, on your own, with little to no professional support!), the “country doctor” took a sabbatical during which he read extensively, rejuvenated his spirit and considered what his next step might be. He later accepted a position as an attending physician at a psychiatric center, and this professional re-entry set the course for the next phase of his career.

While providing basic medical services to the patients of the center, Dr. Kohls developed a deep interest in the shared physiology underlying many of their mental health issues, regardless of diagnostic labels. He determined that almost every patient had endured some sort of trauma—physical, emotional or both—prior to developing their particular brand of mental ill-health. He began digging deep into the obscure research journals most doctors don’t have the time or interest to read, educating himself on the physiology of the brain and how it is influenced by our environment and our experiences.

Today, Dr. Kohls is an expert on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and believes that an overwhelming majority of those suffering from poor mental health are experiencing physiological brain changes that occurred as a result of traumatic experiences. These changes within the brain, he contends, cannot be corrected or alleviated by the use of modern pharmaceuticals. These drugs, says Dr. Kohls, serve only to mask the problem and potentially create further biological changes within the brain that are not only dangerous but possibly permanently debilitating.

Dr. Kohls now operates an independent clinic called Mind Body Medicine, where he specializes in Holistic Mental Health. His approach focuses on education, prevention and restoration. And almost every person he sees is provided with a personalized supplementation program. (Thanks again for the business, Doc!)

This is really exciting work and Dr. Kohls should be commended for his unconventional practice. Unfortunately, the work is exhausting and he is only able to see a limited number of people. How many doctors do you know who spend a minimum of one hour with each new patient? So the good doctor is now refocusing his career yet again. He’s embarking on a mission to educate other professionals, teach them his successful techniques and also reach out to the patient community with an offer of hope and an alternative perspective to long-term care.

I fully support Dr. Kohls efforts and I am excited to help him bring his message to the greater health community. We’ll be hosting a radio call-in show on our Swanson-sponsored Saturday wellness program that airs on local Fargo station KFGO (listen online at www.kfgo.com every other Saturday at noon). We’ll also be arranging some local lectures as well, which will be filmed and posted on our partner website iHealthTube.com. I’ll keep you posted on the details as they develop.

If you’re interested in learning more about Dr. Kohls’ unique approach to mental health care and holistic wellness, or if you’d like information about how you can arrange for him to speak to your community group or professional organization, post a message in the comments section of this blog (comments are moderated prior to posting, so if you’d like your message to be kept confidential simply state “confidential” in your text). I will pass your inquiry along.

Although my time in the office is increasingly limited and much of my work (including this blog post) is done from the road, I encourage all of our customers to stop in for a visit just like Dr. Kohls did this week. We’re always happy to receive you and show you around. Thanks again to Dr. Kohls and to all of you loyal Swanson customers—without you, we would never achieve our goal of bringing wellness to the world.