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Serotonin is NOT the "Happy" Chemical
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, Christian Jordonov here. I'm a functional health practitioner, author. My latest book is how to actually live longer, volume one, all about longevity. If you are into that topic, please check it out. Check out the book. It's pretty, I'd say, informative. A lot of practical and easy to implement strategies on how to increase your longevity.
Misconceptions about Serotonin
00:00:27
Speaker
Now, today I want to talk to you about
00:00:29
Speaker
a little bit about serotonin. This is a very deep discussion. There's a lot of research that I have yet to dig deep into, but I guess my goal is to at least convey to you that serotonin A is not the happy neurotransmitter or hormone or chemical.
00:00:54
Speaker
and we do not want to increase it. Whatever we do, we don't want to increase it, right? There's no benefits to increasing it, only detriment. And two, knowing this information is going to be helpful
The Dangers of SSRIs
00:01:20
Speaker
in case you were ever put in a position where a person in a butcher coat offers you a chemical synthesized by a company that is very likely to have paid billions in criminal damages and lawsuits.
00:01:43
Speaker
on account of their fraud and crimes in order to raise your serotonin level because they might think it will help you. So if I can help even one person prevent that from happening, I would
00:02:00
Speaker
consider that a success. I have seen what these chemicals, these drugs do to people, and it's pretty horrific, right? Someone close to me was on these anti-depressant SSRIs, and it was very ugly, and I have some clients that have been on them.
00:02:26
Speaker
and nothing good comes out of them, right? So this is basically a money-making scam where they marketed serotonin as the quote-unquote happy chemical. And for decades now, they've been making crap loads of money whilst poisoning people, right? So that's just the reality of the situation. We're all adults here. I feel like
00:02:58
Speaker
There's no need to tiptoe through the tulips, right? That's the reality of the situation. So we need to protect ourselves from this, okay? In 2020, in the USA, some 45 million antidepressant prescriptions were written, right? That's a lot of people. Of those,
00:03:23
Speaker
more than 2 million were for children, people under the age of 17. So it's bad. It's bad. And the worst part is that even if someone is quote unquote depressed, increasing their serotonin is not the solution. In fact, as you'll see later, serotonin is often elevated in depression. But here's, let's start from the beginning.
Serotonin's Role and Effects
00:03:54
Speaker
What is serotonin if it's not the happy chemical? Has it been marketed? So what was interesting for me when I started doing the research last year is if you even go to Wikipedia right now,
00:04:09
Speaker
You will see, I've got some snippets here I'll read from the Wikipedia article. You'll see very plainly that it's not a happy chemical, right? So listen to this. This is from Wikipedia, so it's not controversial by any means. So besides mammals, serotonin is found in all bilateral animals, including worms and insects, as well as fungi and in plants. So you could say it's a primordial chemical shared by
00:04:40
Speaker
a lot of life. I don't want to say all life, but a lot of life. And other snippets from Wikipedia, serotonin is one compound of the poison contained in stinging nettles. So if you ever as a kid
00:04:56
Speaker
We're playing in the dirt, the forest, and you touch the stinging net, or you know what that feels like. That is mediated, that sort of stinging itchiness and redness that's mediated largely by things like serotonin, histamine, and so on, right? Other things, serotonin is present in insect venoms and plant spines, serves to cause pain, which is also a side effect
00:05:21
Speaker
of serotonin injection. Serotonin is produced by pathogenic amoeba causing diarrhea in the human gut.
00:05:32
Speaker
The gastrointestinal parasite Entomiebohistolytica secretes serotonin causing a sustained secretory diarrhea in some people. Patients infected with Entomiebohistolytica have been found to have highly elevated serum serotonin levels, which return to normal following a resolution of the infection.
00:05:55
Speaker
Entomiebe histolytica also responds to the presence of serotonin by becoming more virulent. This is from Wikipedia. Serotonin is a common component of invertebrate venoms, salivary glands, nervous tissues and various other tissues across mollusks, insects, crustaceans, scorpions, various kinds of worms and jellyfish.
00:06:22
Speaker
in plants serotonin synthesis seems to be associated with stress signals. So this is where kind of once you start digging into it, it actually turns out that serotonin is more of a stress hormone than anything, right? Then there is a very delicate balance between physiological role of gut serotonin and its pathology. In other words,
00:06:50
Speaker
You need very little serotonin in the body. You need some serotonin. None of these things are necessarily inherently bad. When we say these things, I mean, you know, histamine, cortisol, estrogen, serotonin, prolactin.
00:07:07
Speaker
adrenaline, they're not bad. They are required for our normal functioning and survival, but they're required in very tiny amounts at very specific times. So when there's too much of it, like cortisol,
00:07:24
Speaker
adrenaline, you're all amped up, you can't sleep, you're agitated, irritable, estrogen, it will mess with your, you know, hormones and mood and sleep and pain and can cause cancer. So these things are required in tiny amounts for specific purposes. And then the body has to keep them in check, right? So then what else?
00:07:51
Speaker
Again, this is from Wikipedia.
Adverse Effects of SSRIs and Marketing Tactics
00:07:54
Speaker
Some serotonergic agonist drugs cause fibrosis anywhere in the body, particularly the syndrome of retroperitoneal fibrosis as well as cardiac valve fibrosis. Fibrosis is like a scarification.
00:08:09
Speaker
of the tissues, you're laying down collagen. So it does have a quote unquote healing role in specific times and injuries. But if those serotonin receptors are activated too much because of there's a lot of serotonin systemically,
00:08:30
Speaker
that can drive that fibrosis and that fibrosis drives pathology dysfunction. It eventually can lead to cancer in organs. And this final quote from Wikipedia
00:08:45
Speaker
is tells it all really despite its long-standing prominence in pharmaceutical advertising the myth that low serotonin levels cause depression is not supported by scientific evidence that's from wikipedia right so they
00:09:04
Speaker
They know that most people won't do the research. When you go to your person in a butcher coat, they know best, allegedly, and whatever they say goes, and you just follow instructions like a good little whatever. I hate this attitude of looking down upon the person coming to you for help.
00:09:33
Speaker
They're looking down on you and you're nothing, you're nobody, you just do as you're told. Well, that's bullshit. A true practitioner that wants to help a person there, it's a partnership. You don't tell the client what to do necessarily. You coach the client how to help themselves.
00:10:02
Speaker
God complex is ridiculous, right? That a lot of doctors have where, you know, they, they're as if they're healing you or anything. It's the body that heals all the practitioners should do is help the person identify the things that require addressing in terms of imbalances, poor lifestyle choices, dietary choices.
00:10:27
Speaker
deficiencies and then helping them implement the program. It's not about to take this thing, stop that symptom for a while, come back when you have other symptoms. That's so ridiculous, so kindergarten level. So to have a God complex over that, for me it's preposterous and it's kind of the craziness of the world we live in right now. Now,
00:10:55
Speaker
What else here?
Serotonin Production in the Gut
00:10:57
Speaker
So what's important to understand is in animals, humans included, only about 5% of the body serotonin resides in the brain. Most of the body serotonin is housed in the gut with 90% of that being stored in the enterochromofin cells.
00:11:16
Speaker
where it's created most of it is synthesized in these enterochromophin cells and then there's some other my enteric neurons that create the rest of it but basically most of it is in these enterochromophin cells right so
00:11:32
Speaker
They can also secrete it in the bloodstream, and then that serotonin in the bloodstream can be taken up by the platelets, as they're known. Basically, these platelets can release it at certain times when injury is sensed. The important thing to understand is that most of the serotonin is actually made in the gut, in the body, some 90-95% of it.
00:12:00
Speaker
And it has roles like in gastric motility. So for example, if you eat something bad or some quote unquote pathogenic organism enters the gut and the body recognizes that the serotonin can be increased. And that will cause you to expel whatever injurious toxin, food, pathogen, whatever else out quickly because it will increase
00:12:27
Speaker
digestive motility, you're going to basically have diarrhea and get it out of you. So that is a role that serotonin fulfills. Now, in terms of what it can do in the body serotonin, this is again from some papers that I've been kind of looking over, extracting interesting quotes and stuff like that. So serotonin,
00:12:52
Speaker
So experimental data suggests that serotonin drives fibrosis in the skin and visceral organs, right? Already mentioned that.
00:13:07
Speaker
high levels of serum, so blood serotonin, are predictive of an increased risk for hip fracture, non-vertebral osteoporotic fracture, and incident fractures among older men. So that's not good either. By the end of the 1950s, it was widely accepted that migraine headaches
00:13:31
Speaker
and associated symptoms including nausea and visual disturbances were caused by an excess of serotonin and anti-serotonin drugs of various types were being used for treatment.
00:13:45
Speaker
What else? Too much extracellular serotonin in the intestinal lining is harmful and can cause irritable bowel syndrome characterized by symptoms of pain, diarrhea, constipation, indigestion, bloating and headache. So what's interesting is that the serotonin blocking drug, cyproheptidine,
00:14:10
Speaker
That actually has, I think it's, there's, I've seen one study where it actually was helpful, helpful for people with irritable bowel syndrome. And you're thinking like, what's an, it's an antihistamine actually. So it's a serotonin and histamine blocking and it's an anti-colonergic drug. I think it was, uh, it's from the 1960s. So it's quite old, not, not really interesting.
00:14:35
Speaker
to pharma companies, but it's still available in some countries, even it's over the counter from the pharmacy. But it's kind of interesting that irritable bowel syndrome
Impact of Antidepressants on Serotonin Balance
00:14:49
Speaker
can have a component of high serotonin. What's interesting as well is if, as you see later, I'll discuss the fact that in depression,
00:15:02
Speaker
serotonin is actually elevated often. I did an episode on depression, anxiety and insomnia, how they're all connected actually.
00:15:19
Speaker
at least a third of folks with depression have constipation, but there's a big component of gut dysfunction in depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder and stuff like that. So it's also interesting how
00:15:37
Speaker
If you tie in serotonin here, it starts to make sense. So serotonin can be part of IBS. It can be elevated, contributing to IBS. It can be elevated in depression, but also
00:15:51
Speaker
Gut dysfunction is a common feature of depression, anxiety, things like that. So these things are, as always, very much interconnected. And that's why there's been studies where this cyproheptidine not only helps people with depression, like it can completely resolve it for some people.
00:16:13
Speaker
It can also help with various gut issues like irritable bowel syndrome and a bunch of other stuff. So it's kind of if you boil it down back to the mechanisms, it looks like serotonin is a major culprit in these things. And then we won't even get into the cancer and the sort of the fibrosis side of things too much here. But just it's interesting. It's always interesting to
00:16:40
Speaker
to get more pieces of the puzzle. And then you're like, oh, okay, that makes sense. So that drives this. And then you're like, so what do we do? At the end of the day, it gives us simple things to do to prevent these imbalances from occurring. I guess kind of that's where I'm going with this.
00:16:59
Speaker
This is a quote from 2015 from a dude called Paul Andrews, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior.
00:17:16
Speaker
in McMaster University, USA. Now, this is the quote from this dude. Nearly all commonly prescribed antidepressant medications perturb serotonin, an ancient chemical that is found in plants, fungi, and animals. In recent work published in Frontiers in Psychology, we have found that antidepressant medications have adverse health effects on every major process in the body regulated by serotonin,
00:17:45
Speaker
including mood, attention, neuronal growth and death, reproductive functioning, electrolyte balance, digestive functioning, platelet activation and the clotting process. By interfering with numerous adaptive processes, antidepressants appear to degrade the overall functioning of the body. Let me just repeat that.
00:18:09
Speaker
by interfering with numerous adaptive processes, antidepressants appear to degrade the overall functioning of the body. And then it says in the elderly antidepressant use is associated with an increased risk of death, the magnitude of which is arguably
00:18:31
Speaker
greater than the risk of cardiac events caused by the painkiller vioxx. Such evidence suggests that antidepressants do more harm than good. Of course, they're still on the market and they will be on the market for decades longer.
00:18:50
Speaker
This is kind of the insidious nature of a lot of these chemicals is they cause dysfunction and degeneration and all this stuff and disease. They do it very slowly. So something like thalidomide and stuff where babies were born without limbs and just kind of all these other horrible drugs where people die very quickly.
00:19:14
Speaker
you know, people catch on very quickly to that. So the insidious nature of these other things like birth control pills that raise estrogen and mess with the hormone balance, they cause disease and other dysfunction, but it takes years to develop. So it's very difficult to pinpoint it back to a specific thing, right? But people are widening up to this. They're widening up, right? Now,
00:19:45
Speaker
What was interesting for me is I just stumbled on a study called Pharmacology of Serotonin and Female Sexual Behavior. This is very interesting for some reasons now. So this is from that study. It's kind of a review paper. There's quite a lot of animal research that they cite there, but some of the summaries that the researchers
00:20:11
Speaker
give us include things like although findings were not always consistent, the bulk of evidence supported the hypothesis that compounds that increased serotonin reduced female sexual behavior
00:20:28
Speaker
and compounds that decreased serotonin facilitated sexual behavior. So things that increase serotonin reduce libido sexual behavior in females, whereas things that decrease serotonin facilitate sexual behavior. So things like dopamine and stuff like that, which serotonin and dopamine are fairly antagonistic
00:20:52
Speaker
So that's kind of interesting. Why are so many women being pushed these antidepressants? Because there's a much bigger segment of the population that is female getting pushed these drugs. Do they want women to have lower libido and have sex less and maybe have less children? I don't know.
00:21:21
Speaker
not a conspiracy theorist, but man, you know, you read enough things, you start to kind of put pieces together. And anyway, most antidepressants can produce sexual dysfunction in human females, but SSRIs are associated with the highest incidence. And the most prevalent complaint following SSRI treatment is related to low sexual desire and satisfaction. In fact, there's
00:21:46
Speaker
There's the whole thing called, what's it called? Post SSRI sexual dysfunction. That's a syndrome or a thing now that's recognized. And yeah, so what else from this article? I think that is enough. That's enough said, right? So interesting, before I found this out,
00:22:12
Speaker
When my wife was having her insomnia sort of postpartum, she went through a time of insomnia, the feeding schedule, the breastfeeding schedule messed up her sleep and so on. And there was a massive challenge of figuring things out to help her sleep. And one of the things we did try was 5-HTP. Now you may have heard of 5-HTP.
00:22:36
Speaker
5 hydroxy trip to fan that's the precursor to serotonin and serotonin can become melatonin so that was my um you know my uh sort of that was my rationale for trying it then if you listen anyone you ask even right now that's an even a naturopath or
00:22:55
Speaker
nutritionist or doctor, everybody will tell you, you need more serotonin if you're not feeling well or depressed or you have mood issues. And a lot of most natural practitioners will be, you know, serotonin is good. And I think people are slowly waking up to the marketing scam of Big Pharma.
00:23:19
Speaker
But it's going to take decades again because there's so much literature that is supportive of these hypotheses, like the cholesterol hypotheses, all these things, you know. So it's going to take ages. So at least you now know that if you're ever struggling with sleep or mood stuff, blah, blah, blah, you
00:23:46
Speaker
The 5-HTP is probably the last supplement you want to add. Now it might help. You see, these things can help in the short term, but it's the long-term ramifications that we need to be wary of. So I would never use tryptophan ever again. I would never recommend it. The tryptophan is the amino acid precursor to 5-hydroxytryptophan, which then can then become
00:24:14
Speaker
serotonin. So I would not use that. And what's interesting is if you look at the protein content of all foods, plant or
00:24:25
Speaker
animal foods, like whey protein powders, all of that stuff. Tryptophan is always the amino acid with the lowest amount in all types of protein. So that kind of is very telling how little of it we need in the diet and how little we need serotonin in the body. Okay, where to take this now?
How SSRIs Work and Their Delayed Effects
00:24:53
Speaker
Okay, so the same guy that I was just citing, Paul Andrews, the assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior, he and his group published a paper in 2015 called, Is serotonin an upper or a downer? The evolution of the serotonergic system and its role in depression and the antidepressant response. That's fairly technical.
00:25:22
Speaker
article, but basically they have three claims in there and they're supported by a bunch of literature and so on. So first, serotonin transmission is elevated in multiple depressive phenotypes, including melancholia, a subtype associated with sustained kidney. So nevermind that, but basically their first claim is that serotonin is actually elevated in multiple types of depression, basically. That's all I should have said.
00:25:52
Speaker
The second claim is that the serotonergic system evolved to regulate energy. So it's not a mood sort of increasing hormone, it's an energy regulating chemical. And when a person's serotonin is increased by the use of these
00:26:11
Speaker
SSRI drugs, it disrupts their energy homeostasis and actually worsens symptoms initially. That is why some of these SSRI drugs have the so-called black box label that they can increase
00:26:30
Speaker
suicide in the short term, right, in the first two weeks. That is because they make people feel absolutely freaking horrible. But what's interesting in a perverted way is that some of them, for example Phloxetine or Prozac, apparently that one and some other ones, they can actually increase
00:26:49
Speaker
a thing called allopregnentalone initially that actually can give you a feeling of well-being which allopregnentalone actually is a it's a metabolite of progesterone
00:27:05
Speaker
the hormone progesterone and it has antidepressant and other beneficial properties, right? So that actually has been recent, some years ago became a FDA approved for treatment of postpartum depression.
00:27:25
Speaker
So they do that. Some of them, they increase the salopreginalone, which can give people some relief, but then they increase in serotonin and can really mess them up, you know, like sexually and just, just, I don't know if, if.
00:27:41
Speaker
if you can imagine what it must be like to have very compressed and emotional spectrum where the lows are not that low, the highs are not that high. So it's very blah, you know, it's kind of, I guess I'm a bit empathetic so I can kind of relate to what it must feel like. And it's, it feels fairly horrible, at least when I empathize it anyway. So then the third claim in that paper from this Paul Andrews dude,
00:28:11
Speaker
is that symptom reduction is not achieved by direct pharmacological properties of the SSRIs, but by the brain's compensatory responses that attempt to restore energy homeostasis. So these responses take several weeks to develop, which explains why SSRIs have a therapeutic delay. So they'll tell you it can take several weeks, couple of months to feel the benefits. But the benefits you're getting from it
00:28:39
Speaker
is not from the actual pharmacological treatment, but it's from the brain's compensatory responses, restoring energy homeostasis, right?
00:28:52
Speaker
So basically poison, right? So you're kind of adapting to the poison and the body is very good at adapting to all kinds of stressors and toxins and so on. So it's really disgusting what they're doing. This is like criminal behavior. Any person that
00:29:14
Speaker
prescribes these drugs that is engaging in criminal behavior. And by criminal behavior, I mean causing harm to others, that they're basically causing harm. Whether they know it or not,
00:29:31
Speaker
is besides the point. The fact is that they are causing direct harm, right? Direct, okay.
Publication Bias in Antidepressant Trials
00:29:39
Speaker
Then we have the issue of selective publication of antidepressant trials, right? So in the USA, you have the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. So they have a registry and a results database. So when a drug company wants to do a trial on a chemical,
00:30:01
Speaker
They need to, you know, register it with DA that trial is registered. They explain what they're going to do, what they're testing, blah, blah, blah. And then.
00:30:14
Speaker
So this is kind of so the FDA can keep tabs on them, right? So they have these applications for marketing approval, for change in labeling or the indications which they can be used in, right? So basically there's a bunch of researchers that identified the, this was in 2008 that they published this paper. They basically looked into the database, they looked into the data
00:30:44
Speaker
And they look at which trials were conducted related to antidepressant agents, and which of those were actually then published in the scientific literature, which is where most doctors will only look. Very few doctors have the time capacity and so on to dig into what's not been published. So it's hard enough to keep, even in a very small specialization and niche,
00:31:12
Speaker
It's very hard to keep up with the literature for a doctor never mind to then dig further in what wasn't published stuff like that right so this was published this. This analysis was published in the new england journal of medicine two thousand and eight like i said and basically they identified the face to face three.
00:31:35
Speaker
clinical trial programs for 12 antidepressant agents approved by the FDA between 1987 and 2004. So they looked at studies of 12 different antidepressant agents involving 12,500 patients. So among 74 FDA registered studies, 31 accounting for
00:32:02
Speaker
3400 study participants were not published. So that was about a quarter of the, in terms of study participants, the 31% of those studies that account for a quarter of the study participants were not published, right? So almost a third of the studies covering a quarter of the study participants were not published.
00:32:34
Speaker
Then according to these researchers, studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with three exceptions, either not published, that's 22 studies that were not published, or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome. So that's 11 studies. So they either didn't publish them if the data was bad or they published
00:33:01
Speaker
a negative outcome but framed it in a positive way. And then according to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. So if you look at the published literature on antidepressants as a doctor, it appears that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that only 51% were positive.
00:33:32
Speaker
You know, now it's a bit more common knowledge that
00:33:35
Speaker
people, a lot of people know that these SSRIs, they only help I think something like 40% of people, I think something like 60 to 70% of folks that actually are put on them don't actually get actual benefits, right? And what's interesting is that the placebo effect can account for some up to 40% of the benefits in a trial. So, you know, you can
00:34:06
Speaker
give people sugar pills or something else that's inert and up to 40% of those that placebo arm in a trial will report benefits, right? So they always have to, the best research tries to compare whatever agent, nutraceutical or pharmaceutical, they're using against an ideally a blinded
00:34:34
Speaker
double-blinded placebo arms. So the clinicians or researchers don't know what the person is getting, so they don't project on them how they should or shouldn't improve. And then obviously the patient or the participant of the study, they don't know what they're getting.
00:35:00
Speaker
People, most people know, you probably already know that up to 40% of the placebo group in these studies can actually improve. And so that kind of, it kind of shows the power of the human mind, how much we can actually self heal if sort of given the right conditions mentally and of course physically and nutritionally. But so that's kind of that.
00:35:29
Speaker
94% of the trials looked positive in the published literature, but only 51% in the FDA database analysis showed were published as positive. It goes to show you a lot of fraud and a lot of biases and things like that. Manipulation that
00:35:56
Speaker
or just designed to push these things on the doctors and then the doctors will push them on to their patients and kind of this merry-go-round of hell continues unabated really.
00:36:13
Speaker
So there's so much more here to discuss
Potential of Serotonin Antagonists
00:36:18
Speaker
really. We can talk about serotonin antagonists, right? So this is, I already talked about that cyproheptidine one. What's interesting is there's one called retansurin. It's a serotonin antagonist described as, you can read this on Wikipedia.
00:36:35
Speaker
It's described as anxiolytic, so anti-anxiety, antidepressant, anti-Parkinsonian, and anti-hypertensive. So a serotonin antagonist can help with anxiety, depression, Parkinson's disease, and high blood pressure. So does that kind of
00:37:00
Speaker
tell us that maybe serotonin, because when it's taken up by the platelets, if there's a lot of serotonin in the blood, it can contribute to these clotting processes.
00:37:11
Speaker
Could that be part of why it can contribute to hypertension? Or could it because it increases other stress hormones in the body and that stress response being chronically activated will increase hypertension or high blood pressure? For example, cortisol, adrenaline, these things will increase your blood pressure because they're activating your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, right? It's anti-Parkinsonian.
00:37:38
Speaker
So could serotonin be a factor in things like Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis could be antidepressant. We already saw earlier that serotonin is high.
00:37:52
Speaker
in depression and anxiolytic, so anti-anxiety. So is serotonin just one of those stress hormones contributing to anxiety, insomnia, all of these sort of, this cluster of horrible, nasty stuff that a person can feel?
00:38:13
Speaker
irritability, anxiety, aggression, self-injurious behavior in, let's say, autistic kids and stuff like that. So it's very indicative that that is the case because this specific one, Ritanserin, is actually, it was chiefly investigated as a drug to treat insomnia, especially to enhance sleep quality by significantly increasing slow-wave sleep.
00:38:41
Speaker
by virtue of potent and concomitant serotonin receptor antagonism. So the specific receptors it antagonizes is 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C. So there's a bunch of different serotonin receptors. So what's interesting
00:39:01
Speaker
is that Ritanser, and according to Wikipedia, was never marketed for medical use due to safety problems, but is currently used in scientific research. So it's very interesting. So safety problems with a drug, has that ever been a problem to push these things on the market? Think of
00:39:23
Speaker
DES, all these kind of estrogens, destroying women's health. Think of all these drugs causing people to commit suicide or things like thalidomide and causing kids to be born without limbs and all these other experimental things going on. So it's never been an issue pushing things on the market. And look, if there's a big enough,
00:39:50
Speaker
public outcry, if enough people die and we have to take it off the market and maybe pay a few billion in fines and grease a few palms and whatever else to make the problem go away, that's totally fine. But this particular one, there was safety problems, right? So it was never marketed for medical use, but it is used in scientific research. And what kind of scientific research?
00:40:20
Speaker
none other than freaking glioblastoma, right? Glioblastoma. This is the most aggressive and most common type of cancer that originates in the brain and has very poor prognosis for survival. So a serotonin antagonist may be
00:40:49
Speaker
may be used in treatment of this glioblastoma, this most aggressive and most common type of cancer originating in the brain. And not only glioblastoma, but also melanoma, skin cancer, right?
00:41:06
Speaker
So that's interesting. And then cyproheptidine, I already mentioned cyproheptidine. So that was a first generation antihistamine with anticholinergic, anti serotonergic, and local anesthetic properties. Interestingly, it is used as a preventative treatment against migraine.
00:41:30
Speaker
In a 2013 study, the frequency of migraine was dramatically reduced in patients within seven to 10 days after starting treatment. So is serotonin also a factor in migraines? I know it can also be used for insomnia, this one. Oh yeah, so it's used off-label to treat various dermatological conditions.
00:41:52
Speaker
Psychogenic itch, psychogenic itch. That psychogenic is basically like if you have an itch and nothing is causing it and just something is itching, that's psychogenic where they cannot figure out what's causing it. But apparently a serotonin antagonist can help with that.
00:42:14
Speaker
excessive sweating, hyperhidrosis, and a bunch of other stuff, but also insomnia.
Advice on Supplements and Consulting Services
00:42:22
Speaker
So a lot of applications for serotonin antagonist
00:42:28
Speaker
chemicals, right? So I guess more of the story, if I were to say what would be the key takeaway here is to be aware of this stuff and
00:42:45
Speaker
Just be careful what you decide to put in your body. Like I said already, tryptophan supplements, serotonin boosting things like 5-HTP, 5-hydroxytryptophan, which you can get over the counter as a supplement.
00:43:04
Speaker
I would not do that. If you need help with sleep or feeling better, there's better ways to achieve those goals. And then on the synthetic chemical side of things, you probably know what my view is, as they say, buyer beware there. Do your own research and stuff like that.
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's all I wanted to cover. I hope you found this interesting and useful. And don't forget, I also offer health consulting. So if you have some health issues, you can just go to my website, read more about how I work, what we do, and then you can book a free intro call with me and we can discuss your situation and I can offer some insights and how I can help.
00:43:57
Speaker
And yeah, if you are in the market for that, we'd be glad to talk to you, meet you, see where you're at and would love to help if I can. So thank you for tuning into this episode and I'll see you on the next one.