Last week I spoke to a group of psychiatrists, doctors and nurses working at a psychiatric hospital about N-acetyl cysteine for a whole hour! Anyone who has worked in pharmaceuticals, (which of course I did in a previous life) or has seen medical CPD up close even, will appreciate that this really was a remarkable opportunity a) because it wasn’t funded by a drug company whose sole intention is to drive more prescriptions for their drug and b) because it was instead facilitated by a nutritional supplement company (many thanks to Bioconcepts) who allowed me to simply bring the current evidence regarding NAC in mental health: strengths, weaknesses, limitations and all, to the attention of these front line health care providers.
This sort of information i.e. non-drug company sponsored, is simply not getting through to our medical colleagues. This is in part, because their CPD is monopolised by pharmaceutical companies who have the budget to dominate the stage. I’ve worked in that industry and I remember it well but not fondly. So, in spite of the fact that the bulk of the NAC trials in mental health are actually due to the work of own Professor Michael Berk, their colleague, the majority of the attendees had never heard of this nutrient and certainly were not aware of any relevance it had to their own medical practice.
Two absolute highlights from the night for me both came from experienced psychiatrists.
Psychiatrist No 1 said, “I’ve just attended a 3 day symposium on addiction and I learned more from this hour than I did that whole weekend!”
Psychiatrist No 2 said, “If this is such an amazing nutrient and there’s all this research out there being done on it…then why haven’t I heard about it before tonight? Why aren’t any of the drug reps telling me about this?”
Needless to say I carefully suggested that it might not be in the interests of the drug reps to promote a non-patented nutrient or in fact anything outside of their own medication.
Overall it was an inspiring night, if only for the fact that we now have 46 additional mental health care providers who have N-acetyl cysteine on their radar and I would hazard a guess, several of those who will consider trialing in in some of their patients now. Mental health care providers are working at the coalface and in reality are hampered by limited drug options, imagine how much better our patient outcomes could be if we could just get more of this information through to more of them…oh well, we’ve made a little start I think 🙂
A recent systematic review of N-acetyl cysteine in mental health was published you might be interested in reading: Deepmala et al 2015 Clinical trials of N-acetylcysteine in psychiatry and neurology: A systematic review. It’s not available as a free full text but if you want a copy and can’t access it let us know.