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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – The healthcare crisis is attributed to many factors, but not the suppression of innovation. Innovation that improves the quality of care, thus reducing utilization, was advanced twenty years ago as the only solution to healthcare economics. The ability to stimulate immune function would have vast implications for health reform, but is held to be unavailable. In reality, the potent immunostimulating properties of lithium and antidepressants were documented as early as 1981, when I published the first of nine reviews on the topic. A therapeutic claim is fortified when the mechanism is known. In this case, tiny molecules known as prostaglandins, when produced excessively, depress every component of immune function, and induce microbial replication. In the early nineteen seventies, researchers showed that antidepressants and lithium inhibit prostaglandins.
Lithium has immunostimulating, antiviral and antibacterial properties, antidepressants immunostimulating, antiviral, antibacterial, antiparasite, and fungicidal properties. Lithium is effective for paronychia, chalazions, bacterial skin infections, urinary tract infections, canker sores, cold sores and genital herpes, antidepressants for canker sores, cold sores, genital herpes, and probably T.B, malaria, and HIV. Both lithium and antidepressants prevent recurrences of flu’ like colds, thus both could be effective for HINI. Lithium has untapped potential in methicillin-resistant staphylococcal infections, (MRSA) hospital acquired infections (HAIs) sepsis, and pressure ulcers (bed sores).
Immunostimulation is relevant to primary immunodeficiency disorders, bioterrorism, and cancer. It is relevant to veterinary medicine, marine biology, the preservation of species, and agriculture. With the double threat posed by resistant T.B and malaria, the availability of immunostimulation becomes all the more crucial. To this day, government and private laboratories are pursuing immunostimulation in the context of infection and cancer; they are unlikely to succeed, because the problem was solved more than a quarter of a century ago. In a review published in 1983, I proposed that to stimulate immune function, an agent must have mood elevating properties.
Over the past quarter of a century, I appealed to more than a thousand prominent individuals or institutions, including twenty two drug companies, to support the advance, none of whom obliged. Some individuals may have ignored the paradigm shift due to their inability to understand the research and its implications. The same cannot be said of medical journal editors, peer reviewers, members of infection societies, medical school deans, professors, and government health agencies. While the inertia in implementing medical advances is often attributed to “resistance” or “prematurity,” egregious financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest would seem to have been at fault.
Both lithium and antidepressants prevent recurrences of flu’ like colds, thus one cannot be sure which to favor for HINI, the answer emerging were these agents used for the stricken. A few doses of lithium or an antidepressant could sufficiently stimulate immune function, and reduce viral replication, as to help some of the ailing turn the corner.
The availability of immunostimulation should be viewed not only in the context of HINI, but with reference to heath reform. One reads of patients, admitted to hospital for a surgical procedure, that upon contracting a hospital acquired infection spend weeks, or even months in a hospital, the cost in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Contrast that with lithium at less than a dollar a day. My research drew on clinical observation, and the studies of many colleagues indexed in Current Contents, Medline and Pubmed. The contents of this article may be verified by searching these databases. Given the imminent perils, one should question the motives of diehards insisting on, “large scale randomized clinical trials” or “epidemiological studies.”
Editor’s Note: Dr.Julian Lieb, M.D was a Yale psychiatry professor before switching to the immunopharmacology of infectious disorders and cancer. He has authored or coauthored forty-eight articles and nine books. He has published nine articles on the immunostimulating and antimicrobial properties of lithium and antidepressants, and five on the anticancer properties of antidepressants.
www.doctorlieb.com
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