Untitled Document

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

How My Theory Relates to Some Recent Science and Medicine Announcements

My contention that pharmaceutical benefits can be achieved by an illusion of making the nervous system better while actually making it worse by adding stress to already stressed parts of the brain is supported by some recent announcements.

A recent study announced that no conclusive (statistical) link could be proved between the increases in the incidence of autism in the population with the use of certain infant vaccines. This is one of those studies that show how statistics can be manipulated through narrow focus or through the avoidance of other related factors. This study does nothing to prove that vaccines are completely safe if many other medications in use are also unsafe, if no examination was done to find a control group that is completely avoidant of modern medications of any kind (and also avoidant of various chemicals in foods that can cause the same kinds of changes as medications). Has anyone studied how the increase in autism in the population is occurring at a time in our history when there are many more medications in common usage in our population at a greater rate of usage? Perhaps disorders such as autism (and along with autism probably every other developmental and other disorder) are on the increase because the current trends of increased medication usage are increasing the amount of stress being added to the nervous systems of our population. (And don’t hold your breath for the pharmaceutical industry to do this study!) If that is true, then a study that focuses only on incidence of autism relating to vaccines with mercury will not show any statistically important relationship when the general usage of all medications and wrongheaded theory concerning the nature of those medications is really the cause.

Another study that supports my previous paragraph is a recent one that examined the incidence of various mental illnesses in different countries and showed that the USA has the highest percentage of the population with mental illness in the world and showed that developed (rich) countries had a bigger percentage of their populations with mental illness than do the poorest third world countries. Some took this study to be proof of some moral or political doctrine. No. The place to look in explaining this study is the rate of medication use in these various countries. The United States is not medicating more than the other countries because it has more mental illness, it has more mental illness than the other countries because it is medicating more. This is a much better explanation than any other when the desperate conditions of poverty in some countries should cause more mental illness there due to the stresses of situation and starvation and exposure to disease.

The maker of Paxil has been sued for not revealing studies about the bad effects their drug has had on teens while they promoted the use of the drug on that population. There is much more evidence of how the antidepressants can stress the patients and even make them worse in behavior and worse in mood than is being admitted to here and in other studies. And still nobody has sued them for marketing the overall numbers who improve the major symptom instead of marketing the numbers improved after subtracting the placebo numbers. (A more honest marketing of the data on this kind of drug might look something like: “12% improved over placebo, 12% did worse on the major complaint, and 24% did about the same on the depression although they all did worse in various other realms with the side-effects” instead of the same concept written as “62% did better on the drug while 50% did better on placebo.”)

Another recent study showed that dogs and other animals can learn language like children when some prodigy dogs were examined who could learn a word with one exposure to it relating to a unique object and recall the association weeks later. This goes against the concept of the evolution of a “language module” as promoted by Pinker and all. Animals with no language should have no language module and should not be able to understand language if this theory is right. But the amount of brain and the amount of stress in the brain caused by genetics and other reasons as an explanation for differences of ability and behavior that are part of my theory would explain this study in a better way. My theory that the same mathematical factors are at work in all brains and that the brain just makes sense of the body it is in is a better explanation for why this study could get these results.

Another recent study showed that using small dosages of DDT in rats could actually decrease the size of liver tumors. This is very interesting when 30 years ago DDT was banned from most of the world due in part to other studies that showed that DDT could cause liver tumors in rats without such tumors (these studies used much larger dosages of the DDT on these rats). This is just further evidence that the way you use a medication can greatly change the reaction to that medication. I know nothing of the particulars concerning DDT, but excesses of any drug that has an effect on the nervous system can cause opposite reactions than are caused by much lower dosages. I have written several essays that explain how a decision can flip when neurotransmitters exceed a certain level at the synapse. I have also recently published here my explanation of a method of treatment that has been flamed with considerable insult by some writers who have not read more than a couple of my essays (I can tell by looking at their ISPs and looking at the hit counter). One wrote that if Ritalin could be used for a cure, then everyone with ADD would be cured by now, but my treatment uses the drug in a very different way at much smaller dosages delivered as evenly over time as possible and during sleep as well (a major component of why the treatment is different and why it works).

You can’t judge my treatment without reading all of this material and following all of the instructions for administering this treatment.

By the way, if the drug Ritalin is already in use by people with ADD/ADHD, then my method of treating such people should be very ethical because it uses a much smaller dosage of the drug that they are already using and smaller dosages of medication should be safer than bigger dosages, shouldn’t they???

The treatment should also be considered ethical and worth trying on Coma patients who have nothing to lose from it (it should be successful on a percentage of those who don’t have significant brain death at a rate greater than the rate of spontaneous recovery using the current method of doing nothing but waiting).

It should be tried on animals with a variety of problems. Who is going to start trying this treatment? Who is going to think this through by actually reading my arguments to realize this is worth trying?

Another complaint in the flames about my website is that it is too verbose. I don’t think it can be avoided. If I give a very simple explanation of what is going on in the brain without a lot of argument to support it, then nobody will believe that I am right, as it will seem too simple. A simple explanation can require a massively complicated argument to make its case when so many wrong ideas need to be replaced with the simple theory that works.

[Click to Go Back to Unified Theory More Essays Page]

[Click to Go Back to Unified Theory Directory Page]