Recently a very experienced practitioner who uses SAMe frequently and successfully in her patients and also delivers education said to me, “I don’t know what I am doing wrong – practitioners still come back to me with cases where they’re throwing 8 different products at a patient to ‘lower histamine, improve mental health and support methylation’ instead of using just one – SAMe!” I laughed and said, whatever you’re doing WRONG in trying to teach people about SAMe I am doing WRONGER and for LONGER!! I’ve been trying to encourage and inspire confidence in prescribing SAMe for 2 decades now and still some of my most loyal listeners, are like, ‘I still haven’t prescribed it, I am too scared.’ 🤯
But I think the fear factor around SAMe occurs for several reasons:
Misinformation – there is a LOT of misinformation about HOW SAMe works and WHAT kind of power it wields therapeutically
Misunderstanding – this comes from a couple of key misunderstandings about drug interactions and SAMe pharmacokinetics & pharmacodynamics
Mystery – even for me, SAMe has had an air of mystery about it, nagging, seemingly unanswerable questions that can undermine our confidence and certainty about its appropriate use and safety
I get it. And given the studies employing SAMe as a therapeutic agent date all the way back to the 1970s and continue to today – in psychiatry, hepatobiliary disease, cancer etc – there is a LOT of information that has been gathered overall and a LOT of old ideas/theories/speculation replaced by understanding thanks to better methods and models of scientific enquiry. So I decided it was time for me to confront this ‘man/molecule/medicine of mystery’ head on, conduct a completely updated literature review of SAMe and along the way – challenge many of my long held beliefs.
I thought about calling this latest episode, ’30 Things You Don’t Know About SAMe’ – and calling it like a horse race because in all honesty I learned THAT MUCH!
But I settled for: The Big SAMe Rethink – inspired by one of many pivotal papers which helped to revolutionise my understanding & approach to this nutraceutical which you can read yourself here. Misinformation, misunderstandings and mystery be gone (ok well most of it anyway!) – by filling in the gaps in our information that previously fuelled these – we can move forward with much greater confidence and clarity and we now know where the real safety concerns exist.
The Big SAMe Rethink Part 1
Do you feel like you need to pick a SAMe side? Researchers and clinicians, alike, seem divided in their opinion about its therapeutic capacity and certainly its safety. One side are the ‘naysayers’: ‘SAMe can’t possibly be effective for both depression and in hepatobiliary conditions and and and’. Keeping them company are the ‘doomsayers’, preaching danger and destruction should we prescribe this ‘universal methyl donor’. But the other camp can seem just as fanatical and far-fetched at times: ‘it’s good for just about everything with zero safety concerns’. The divide and differences come down to origins of evidence and, once again, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. This new information on SAMe’s behaviour as a supplement will prompt you to rethink so much of what you thought you knew, whatever side you’re on!
