Dr. Popper's Opinion Of EMPowerplus

EMPowerplusThe following account of Dr. Popper's initial experience with EMPowerplus is taken from testimony he gave as an expert witness in Truehope's 2006 court victory over Health Canada. He testified that up to that time, he had assisted 100-150 of his own patients and consulted with other doctors on 300-500 more patients in the use of EMPowerplus. Dr. Popper has been using EMPowerplus in his private practice since 2000, and published a commentary on EMPowerplus in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 2001.

How did you first get involved or introduced to this supplement?

Somewhat reluctantly actually… I have for my entire career been very much the sort of mainstream child and adolescent psychopharmacology psychiatrist/physician who paid, frankly, next to no attention to nutritional factors, either in my professional life or in my personal life.

Interesting new findings

One day out of the blue, I received a phone call from Dr. Marcel Kinsbourne, who is one of the leading neuropsychiatric researchers, saying that he had gotten a call from a former graduate student of his, Dr. Bonnie Kaplan. He said that Dr. Kaplan has described getting some interesting new findings on the treatment of bipolar disorder using vitamins and minerals….

…Bonnie Kaplan was going to be coming to Boston around Thanksgiving…and she had made arrangements to meet with Dr. Kinsbourne to describe her new findings. The question was, would I be willing to come and listen?

And so I wound up going, and as it turned out, Dr. Kaplan came to McLean Hospital with David Hardy and Tony Stephan.

…Tony and David described a lot of anecdotal experience that they had had using this treatment in a fairly large number of people…

Dr. Bonnie Kaplan…had some patients that had been treated under blind conditions that would increase the validity of the observations. And I heard what they had to say and it struck me as very strange…

Strike one

But as I listened to them, they made some claims about this treatment that struck me as pretty obviously ridiculous. For one thing, they said that this treatment…would effectively treat around 80 percent of bipolar patients. …80 percent just struck me as wrong, inflated, …unlikely. …There was nothing in psychiatry that was even looking in that general direction. So, their claim of an 80 percent response rate struck me as bogus. False.

Strike two

…Their second claim…was that when they treated patients who were not previously on psychiatric medications with this EMPower stuff, that they could see clinical improvement within five days.

Now, we don’t have anything in psychiatry that works that fast… So, for them to say that they can start a treatment and five days later see an improvement struck me as ridiculous…

So, in my own mind I was thinking, “You know, that's strike two. That's…just two strong claims they're making that are obviously false.”

Strike three

Then they had a third claim…that when you give the EMPowerplus to patients already on psychiatric drugs…that the vitamins and minerals amplify the effects of the psychiatric drugs to such a degree that you had to lower the doses or otherwise the patients would get sick or side effects from their psychiatric drugs. Well, [there’s] nothing like that, no suggestive data even slightly in that direction in the field of psychiatry; nothing.

…So, I had a very clear response to that one. That one to me was strike three. “And what am I doing in this room? And I've been in this room for an hour! And life is short. And I gotta get out of here.”

"How do I get out?"

…I sat there for a minute trying to figure, “how do I get out of this small group without appearing too offensive?” So, what I said was, “Well, jeez, you know, I have a patient at 2:00” (which I didn't; I had allotted two hours to hear these people but I had had enough). “…Could you give me a list of the ingredients just so I can sort of think about this and read up about these different minerals and vitamin effects on mental functioning?”

… I figured they'd give me a piece of paper… But they said they didn’t have a copy of it… and they said, “Here, why don't you take this bottle?” I knew that the bottle cost $75. I didn't want to trouble them wasting $75 on me. I said, “No, no, just e-mail me with a list of your ingredients and that'll be great.” But David Hardy was pretty insistent…

Hiding the evidence

So…I took the bottle, said thanks…and as soon as I was outside the room…I literally took the bottle and put it under my coat, because I was going to be walking through McLean Hospital and I didn't want people seeing this bottle. And when I got to my office I took the bottle and stuck it behind a stack of journals, because I was afraid some parent might see the bottle, or that some kid wandering around would pick up the bottle and say, you know, “Look mommy, what's this?” or that the cleaning lady at the hospital overnight would see the bottle. I just didn't want it in sight. So, I stuck it there and left it.

A call for help

Well, a really strange thing happened that day… That evening around 5:00, I got a call from one of my child psychiatry colleagues who said, “Could you please consult on my child as soon as possible, like, right now?” And frankly, if it was anybody else, I'd say, “Well, jeez, you know, I can certainly see you in a couple of months or three months…” but this was…a colleague and a friend. And I said, “Sure,” and made an arrangement to see the child and both parents that evening.

A bipolar child

The child was a 10 year old who had been having temper tantrums—severe temper tantrums—for two to four hours a day, every single day for about four months. These were really severe tantrums; the kid spinning on the floor…not even having…bodily control enough to stand up. …I knew that that was a bipolar child…

So, I told the parents that, you know, just as they feared, the child definitely did have bipolar disorder and that the treatment was going to be long and involved…and that the odds were going to be very good and something could be done to improve the situation, but it would be still leaving a fair amount of psychiatric symptoms even after we've done everything we can with typical psychiatric medications.

The options

So, we started discussing the options but I explained to them that I didn't want to start anything that day because…I always insist on seeing a child a second time, at least, before starting a serious psychiatric medication. So…I suggested that we could meet in a week…which, you know, the child psychiatrist knew perfectly well was the appropriate thing to do… But…the father said, “Isn't there anything we can do? I mean we just -- we can't get through another week with this.” And I really didn't want to give any because I wanted to see the kid clean and get a clean reading on what the child looked like at a different point of time.

…And we sat there for a few minutes sort of with this impasse…

"Let's give it a try"

So, I said, “Look, you know, I heard about this really weird treatment today, and if you want to hear about it I can tell you about it.” And so…I went through the whole story with them. I told them about all three strikes and was very clear about my attitude about the treatment, but the parents felt, “Look, it's something. Let's give it a try.”

…So, I took the bottle out from behind the journals and handed to them. I was just thrilled to get it out of my office; just delighted… I remember thinking, “the cleaning lady…” and not to have to have that discussion.

So, I gave them the bottle. I said “…I'll see you in a week and we'll see where things are.” And I was perfectly satisfied that I was going get a clean reading on the kid.

"Placebo effect"

So, the father calls four days later and he says, “The tantrums are gone! Not better, not a lot better, gone!” And that the kid wasn't even irritable.

…But I thought, “The vitamins and minerals, obviously, would not have done that; no drug would have done that…”

So, I said to myself, “This is a placebo, clear and simple.” And I said to them, “Oh, that's wonderful. That's great. Keep that treatment going and I'll see you in three days and we'll take a look.” And I figured, “[In] a few more days that placebo effect is going to wear off, I'll get my nice clean look at the kid and see what he's about.”

“A totally different child”

So, I saw the kid three days later at the seven-day point, and he was a different kid. The first time I saw him, he was surly, nasty. Everything out of his mouth…if it wasn't a curse, it felt like a curse—snarly… The second time, he was warm, thoughtful, intelligent, organized…very aware of the complexity of his feelings, very articulate about it; he was a totally different child.

So, I was floored and said to myself… “This is still a placebo. Placebos can last up to a couple of weeks in child psychiatry…” To them I said, “Isn't that wonderful? Keep the treatment going,” and set an appointment to see them a week later.

When I saw him a week later, he was just like he was that second time: bright, articulate, sensitive, the whole bit. Very impressive kid.

…They had ordered up new bottles because the bottle that I had given them was a two week supply… I said, “well, you know, I still want to follow this closely” and I was expecting the kid to break loose within a few days...

“The tantrums are back full force”

The father called a couple of days later and said, “You know, we ran out of the EMPowerplus. The bottles…didn't arrive. And so, the kid's been off.” And he called me at the 48-hour point and he said, “The tantrums are back full force.”

So, I said, “Jeez, well, you know…we can get conventional psychiatric medications going now…or if you want, you can wait for when the bottle arrives and you can retry the stuff,” although I was definitely leaning toward conventional treatment. And they said, no, they wanted to wait. The stuff had been shipped. It should be arriving any day.

Well, it was…in the Christmas season. The package must have gotten lost in the mail… So, the kid continued with these temper tantrums every single day for about a week. And the family was about to go on vacation. They didn't know what to do. The stuff hadn't arrived. So, I had a list of the ingredients by that point and I said, “Look, I'll tell you what. I'm going to go our local health foods store and start pulling ingredients off the shelf to try to approximate some mix of what was in the EMPowerplus formula.” It's not that I believed it; it's just that they were going to wait anyway, so, I may as well at least try to get some portion of that vitamin/mineral treatment to them.

"A hundred bottles"

So, I went…to the health food store and frankly sort of made a scene by…buying a hundred bottles to try and get the various ingredients in the right forms…and to try and get a reasonable balance… So I bought up the pile of bottles. I gave them to my friend and said, “You know, why don't you try those? It's the best we can do…” And I said to myself, “This is totally ridiculous…”

So they gave the kid this…mess of pills. They called me from vacation to say, “You know…this is not like the original formula, but… he's about 60 percent better than he was, and that's making the vacation workable.”

That was the first time I began to believe that maybe there was something to this—maybe…

They came back from their vacation. The package still hadn't arrived. He…went back to school and interestingly, the teachers said that he was about 60 percent better, entirely on their own.

And then a few days after that, the package arrived… The child went back on EMPowerplus and the father called me four days later and said the tantrums were gone—totally gone.

"Strong evidence"

…So, that's several reversals, and each reversal strengthens the case that there's a causal relationship between the drug treatment and the response. So, that, at that point, was really extreme, strong evidence, and it really made me pay attention.

Over the course of time…the family decided… “This is a lot of pills…We can try…lowering the dose little by little.” …They got down from 32 to 24 pills, and at that point the symptoms began coming back… So they just put it back to 32 and left it there.

He stayed on [EMPowerplus] for maybe another year. Zero tantrums. Zero over that entire period of time. And then again, they decided, “Hm, so many pills. It's been such a long time. Maybe he can do with a few less.” So again they try to lower the number…and they found that the child needed the full dose...

So every single time there was a stopping or a reduction of the dose…there was a return of these obviously unmistakable symptoms, and every time he went back on the product, he improved and his symptoms were gone.

Conventional medications

A couple of years later, he decided he just doesn't want to do the pills… And so I work with the child and the family. We discontinued the EMPowerplus. He went on conventional medications and he did not badly with them. But they didn't work as well. He…became sort of chronically irritable; not terrible, but…absolutely, unmistakably not his old self. And he complained that the medicines made his mind foggy, that he couldn't think as clearly on the conventional medications. And this was, you know, a star student and…he really cared a lot about his brain working as well as it could…

Back on EMPowerplus

So, after several months…on conventional meds, he decided he wanted to go back on EMPowerplus… He made the transition back to EMPowerplus and he's been fine ever since. No tantrums. He's not messing with the dose. And he is a superstar student.

Experience with other patients

So, that was the case that got me interested… And I figured, you know, “This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but…I have other patients who are not doing great on conventional medicines. I really owe it to them to at least inform them about the treatment… I started telling certain of my…patients who even on good conventional medication therapy were having a hard time. …I told them about the treatment. I gave them all the provisos. I gave them all my doubts. I told them about the one case. And I said, you know, “I don't know, I just don't know, but this is a choice that you can make. If you want to give it a try, we can give it a try. If you want to stick with the conventional meds. that's absolutely a reasonable decision.”

Some of them chose to try; some of them chose not to. And so, [I began], little by little, to have some experience with other patients, converting them from their…prior medication regimens to EMPowerplus.

"All three strikes...were true"

And as I began to work with other patients, and seeing that it worked, and getting more experience, I found several things. One was those three strikes. It did look like about an 80 percent response rate. For the people that went on EMPowerplus who were not previously on medications, they did show a response within a small number of days, faster than Lithium, faster than the drugs. And most baffling, that when we added EMPowerplus to a psychiatric regime, that they would get flooded with side effects…of the psychiatric medications that they were on, and that we really had to reduce the doses of conventional psychiatric medications… So, all three strikes, the things that got me out of the room initially, all three of them were true.

And over the years, subsequently, that I’ve been working with it, those initial findings that were being described by Bonnie and Tony and David, they've all held out.

It took me a very long time to not be extremely suspicious of the treatment… But it was so consistent… And, you know, the way [I] do it now differs very, very slightly from the method that…I understand they use at Truehope. But in essence, what they were describing…was absolutely right.

“My own opinion”

My…observations are basically those of a clinician—albeit trained to sort of work with new treatments and observe the subtleties of treatments that aren't well understood—they're still the observations of one clinician. We don't have any completed controlled trials. We don't have the kind of scientific data that would allow me to recommend to my colleagues that this is a treatment that ought to be used...

But…my own opinion is that this stuff works—in many cases dramatically and much better, for many people, than conventional medications have.

Dr. Charles Popper,

Harvard Medical School

A Promise Of Hope

I would encourage everybody to get a copy of Autumn Stringam's book entitled : A Promise Of Hope.

It tells the story of her recovery from the world of fear and depression brought on by bipolar illnesses using Truehope's food supplement.

Autumn is the daughter of one of the co-founders of Truehope.

The Truehope Story

About Truehope

Truehope Nutritional Support Ltd. is a non-profit company dedicated to sharing its knowledge world-wide to offer hope to all who suffer from bipolar disorder (manic depression), anxiety disorder (panic attacks), ADD/ADHD and other mental illnesses. Since 1996, Truehope has been steadily involved in research and individual case series to validate our support process and the effectiveness of our alternative mental health treatment, EMPowerplus. Our goal is to help the thousands who suffer with mental illness to find the hope and health they are seeking. Please take a moment to review the exciting research in the treatment of bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses using EMPowerplus, and then learn more about the alternative treatment and support Truehope can offer you and your loved ones. Before Truehope... the beginning Ten children were left motherless the cold January day that Debbie took her own life. She had been suffering the pains of Bipolar Affective Disorder for years and finally succumbed to the dark and irrational side of the disease. Somehow, out of the sheer agony and crushing pain of her loss came a determination for Anthony her husband. He began a prayerful and desperate search to find hope and health for their children who were also ravaged by the disease. At the time of her death, two of Debbie’s children had also been diagnosed with BAD. As a desperate father, and after exhausting all known medical routes, Anthony sought the help of a friend David Hardy. Together these two men established a program of nutritional supplementation that would eventually lead to the recovery of Anthony’s children and the formation of The Synergy Group of Canada Inc. – a non medical research group dedicated to researching and overcoming the disorders of the central nervous system. Debbie's tragic death had initiated that series of events which would change the grim picture of mental illness forever. Joseph's story Joseph Stephan exhibited signs of attention deficit disorder as a child. By the time he entered puberty, the symptoms were escalating into panic attacks, delusions and violent fits of rage. Ultimately, he was diagnosed with BAD shortly after Debbie’s death. Joseph was first treated with lithium, an element used to make batteries, which caused severe side effects. When he refused to take it, he lapsed into severe mania and panic within a couple of days. Then, on January 20, 1996, Joseph started using the nutritional supplementation program created by his father and David Hardy. The results were dramatic and immediate. Within four days he was off the lithium; within two weeks, his mood and emotional control improved immensely. In the years since, he has maintained his well being and has had no recurring symptoms. Autumn's Story Autumn Stringam's recovery is, if anything, more dramatic than her brother's. At 12, she showed signs of suffering from Bipolar Disorder, a condition which deteriorated throughout her teens. She married Dana, had a child at 20, and was subsequently diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder I with rapid cycles; a daily seesaw of mania and depression. Those eventually gave way to regular visual and aural hallucinations and the belief her husband and other family members were conspiring to kill her. These visions often led her to act out violently. Following a particularly terrifying episode, Autumn was admitted to a psychiatric ward. After many adjustments to her medications, she was released a few weeks later. Drugged and with her cognition impaired, she “broke through” her medications frequently and was extremely unstable. After threatening suicide, she was again hospitalized. Upon release, she was taking a pharmaceutical cocktail of Haldol, Rivotril, Ativan, Epival and Cogentin, a combination that failed to control her psychosis. She continued to rapid cycle. Told Autumn would require round-the-clock adult supervision, Dana took her to her father to begin the alternative treatment, which had helped Joseph. Within four days she was forced to eliminate Haldol and Rivotril because of the drastically increasing side effects. Ativan was no longer required when hallucinations ceased. After one week on the program, she returned home to her husband. Less than a month later, she reduced, then eliminated, the mood stabilizer Epival. Her only “medication” now was the nutrient supplement which would become Empowerplus. Autumn's recovery exceeded the expectations of her psychiatrist, doctor and family. The woman who was expected to remain a prisoner of BAD, confined by a medley of psychotropic drugs and pursued by thoughts of suicide for the rest of her life, continues to be healthy and stable to this day. But perhaps even more compelling is how Autumn, once counseled to be sterilized after the birth of her son, gave birth in 1999 to a happy, healthy daughter, and again in 2001 and 2003 to two more healthy daughters! “My life is a miracle and an example for all who suffer,” she says now. “There is hope, healing and ultimately, health for all who seek it; there is an alternative to despair.” Autumn spends her time raising her four wonderful children, remains happily married to Dana, her beloved husband and volunteers for her church and community. Hers is a parable of hope to those who follow her footsteps. Reflections of Faith and Hope Anthony Stephan, in reflecting on the marvelous recovery of his children, said; “Truly God has answered my pleadings and intense prayers with a great blessing.” Hundreds of participants have borne that same witness and acknowledged the hand of God in bringing restoration to their life or that of a loved one. Hence, we have named this web site “TRUEHOPE” because we believe that true hope can only be found in the healing sustenance that God has provided for us. No man or company or science can ever replicate or replace that which our Creator has provided for us. In seeking to treat the symptom, we have all ignored the Source.