Posted by Larry Hoover on April 23, 2003, at 11:04:24
In reply to What are the best Natural Serotonin enhancers?, posted by McPac on April 22, 2003, at 23:13:04
> I want to throw my Zoloft where it belongs (in the toilet). I want to inrease my serotonin naturally instead of using this chemical trash. Any ideas? Can you increase it enough with natural methods?
I think the focus on serotonin with respect to depression is, at its worst, a mistake, and at the least, a distraction. If you want to increase serotonin naturally, buy some tryptophan. You can get it from some sources of veterinary feed supplements.
This isn't the greatest metaphor, but....
Tricyclic antidepressants were discovered totally by accident,what we call in science serendipity. Everyone wanted to know how they worked, and when it was discovered that they block serotonin reuptake, the search then went on to find drugs with a similar action with more benign side-effect profiles. So we got the SSRIs, and on it goes. On to the metaphor.
If you think of a neuron as a loaded gun, and neurotransmitters as fingers on the trigger, tricyclics might be seen as alternative means of pulling the trigger, by way of changing the trigger sensitivity. SSRIs are just different ways of doing the same thing, pulling the trigger. What has been lost in this focussing on a narrow (but observable) effect is that the real change occurs because a bullet is released.
Any time you simplify a complex system, you lose information. I fear that the simplification that declares depression to be the result of an imbalance in serotonin is really meaningless. To focus on just one chemical amidst a soup of other chemicals is wilful blindness. Just think about the blind men and the elephant.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:221657
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030423/msgs/221729.html