Posted by bleauberry on June 26, 2009, at 18:17:45
In reply to Neurotransmitter Test Legit??, posted by gadu on June 25, 2009, at 19:40:17
I took a similar test. The urine neurotransmitter test. Dopamine normal. Norepinephrine normal. Epinephrine elevated. Glutamate normal. Gaba elevated. Serotonin low.
Ok. Now, how useful is that to you? It really isn't. It raises more questions than answers.
The only tests that show what is in your brain and nervous system are brain biopsies and spinal taps. No one is going to do that obviously.
Ok. So the biggest thing with me was low serotonin. So, 5htp, St Johns Wort, SSRIs, and stuff like that, all look reasonable, right? Very wrong. With epinephrine so high, I definitely would not want a noradrenergic drug, right?
The serotonin stuff was all tried. They all made me much more depressed. Much worse. I mean, a lot worse. The norepinephrine stuff was much better.
So you can see, the tests are interesting but not useful. They don't show what is going on in the nervous system, they don't show anything else like receptor sensitivities, receptor densities, receptor damage, nothing.
I mean, you could have perfectly normal neurotransmitters but it is something else screwed up. And who knows what normal is? If it is a so called imbalance, who knows what the correct balance is?
The whole thing is also based on theory not fact. That is, that imbalanced levels of neurotransmitters cause mental illnesses. No one has yet provent that or even come close. All we know is that by exaggerating some of them well beyond normal levels, or by blocking some beyond what is normal, we can induce downstream adaptations in other things that somehow might improve mood if it is a lucky hit.
There are a lot of things in alternative medicine that are light years ahead of mainstream medicine, primarily because in the alternative field is where we find the experimenters, pioneers, and geniuses. In their journeys, in all kinds of illnesses, their gatherings of anecdotal evidence from thousands of patients rapidly over-rules clinical knowledge. There are also a lot of quacks and idiots. The neurotransmitter tests were born in the alternative fields, but I think it is destined to be one of their failures. As in all experimental fields, there are more failures than successes. But the successes are huge when they happen. And then a decade later, they become mainstream medicine. It is in its experimental stage right now. Time will tell.
I think for other types of disease where the amount of serotonin or adrenaline in the blood is a strong diagnostic tool, the tests have a purpose there. For psychiatry, not.
poster:bleauberry
thread:903190
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090620/msgs/903342.html