For decades, lithium was the ‘go-to’ treatment for bipolar disorder. To this day, it still clinically outperforms widely prescribed, expensive pharmaceuticals which are better known (JAMA Psychiatry, 2016).
Many physicians – including Jeffrey Dach, medical director of TrueMedMD Clinic in Florida and a patients’ rights advocate – are proponents of lithium, and fierce when it comes to denouncing the use of psychiatric drugs to treat bipolar disorder and other mood problems, when a much more effective, safer and cheaper treatment is available.
Public bipolar online forums contain hundreds of glowing personal testimonials for lithium treatment. In addition to its mental health benefits, clinical studies have shown that lithium provides marked and fast-acting reduction in pain in fibromyalgia sufferers, is highly effective as an intervention for traumatic brain injury, counteracts neurodegenerative conditions such as stroke and may slow and even possibly prevent Alzheimer’s disease (DrugsAging, 2012).
Lithium has also proved amazingly effective for eliminating cluster headaches. Ward Dean, MD, author of The Unique Safe Mineral with Multiple Uses, claims that lithium has also been successfully used to alleviate migraine, improve low white blood cell counts and mitigate juvenile convulsive disease, alcoholism and liver disorders.
Despite all this, mention lithium and lithium therapy to the average person on the street and you invariably get a negative response. “Every time I mentioned the word lithium to anyone at the office, they would make an unpleasant face and start heading for the exit,” says Dach. “Why? Because most people associate lithium only with mental illness and prescription lithium carbonate, which is routinely used for bipolar disorder. That is the great mistake.”
A naturally occurring element, lithium is found in the earth, in seawater and in trace amounts of most plants and animals. Its effectiveness for treating mood disorders was discovered in 1948 by John Cade, an Australian psychiatrist. He found the calming effects of lithium to be so profound in bipolar patients that, at one point, he postulated that the mental disorder might actually be caused by a lithium deficiency.
Cade focused his studies on the use of lithium carbonate, and it was many years before a standardised protocol was developed that included regular blood tests to monitor ongoing lithium levels in the blood stream. During that experimental time, the prolonged use of lithium carbonate at high doses for bipolar disorder sometimes resulted in toxicity, kidney failure and death in some young patients. As a result, the compound was considered suspect and even illegal in the US prior to 1970.
It also didn’t help that, as a naturally occurring chemical, it could not be patented by pharmaceutical companies and so exploited for commercial purposes. However, its effectiveness for what used to be known as ‘manic depression’ could not be denied. Eventually, with proper monitoring and blood tests, lithium carbonate became the gold standard treatment for bipolar disorder.
For decades, lithium was the ‘go-to’ treatment for bipolar disorder. To this day, it still clinically outperforms widely prescribed, expensive pharmaceuticals which are better known
To this day, most clinical studies involving lithium have centred on the use of lithium carbonate. Even though lithium is lithium, no matter what kind of molecule it is bound to for biological delivery. Very few laboratories investigated the effectiveness of its other forms. That is until the mid-20th century, when the German alternative practitioner Hans Nieper decided to do so.
“Nieper pioneered the use of lithium in the acetate and orotate form,” says Jonathan Wright, medical director of the Tahoma Medical Clinic in Seattle, Washington. “It turns out those forms allowed the penetration of lithium into the cells, so one could have at least partial intracellular lithium. In comparison, lithium carbonate remains almost completely extracellular. The carbonate compound doesn’t help anything to get through the cell walls and it is less well absorbed by the body.”
London holistic healthcare consultant and therapeutic nutritionist Peter Smith first stumbled upon lithium orotate when looking to treat his own bipolar disorder. He too believed lithium to be a toxic element. However, he began to read the clinical studies and discovered that lithium is helpful for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He knew that most antidepressant drugs increase suicidality. However, lithium is one of the very few substances known to reduce suicidality.
Smith went on to discover that lithium is a highly effective substance for speeding up recovery from stroke and other brain injuries. “It assists in growing new grey matter, it is anti-inflammatory, promotes growth of new synapses, increases brain volume, improves metabolism and delivery DHA (an omega 3 fatty acid and primary structural component of the human brain) to the frontal lobe,” he says.
After reading the work of Nieper, Smith was reassured that he could take lithium in its orotate form in low doses. He began self-treating and felt an immediate difference and improvement in his sleep cycles. Gradually, he increased the dose until he was taking 170 mg/day. Over the last five years he has completely managed his bipolar condition with lithium orotate at much lower doses compared with the considerably higher doses of the more widely prescribed lithium carbonate.
Smith also found that lithium toxicity symptoms, such as tremor, can be completely eliminated by increasing the amount of essential fatty acids in the diet, a solution also cited by Wright.
There is much more to say about this fascinating subject, including the studies and case histories, where lithium has helped muscle pain and stiffness, multiple joint pain, severe headaches and back pain. In all such cases medical advice should be sought when discussing personal symptoms.
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