ST JOHN’S WORT: IT REALLY WORKS
Although a common maxim holds that ‘seeing is believing,’ this statement is actually not always true. Seeing can be quite deceptive, as anyone knows who has witnessed the tricks of a competent magician. Conversely, we believe many things that we do not actually see, for example that the earth revolves around the sun. But in some ways the maxim carries the weight of truth: Those things that we cannot see are hard to believe, which is one reason why they gave poor Galileo such a hard time when he maintained that the sun and not the earth was the centre of the solar system. Similarly, controlled treatment studies can appear quite unconvincing if one doesn’t believe in the treatment and the studies are performed by someone else. I encountered this phenomenon after conducting numerous light treatment studies in patients with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), or winter depression. The studies from my group at the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as those of numerous colleagues, told a clear story. Light therapy worked. Yet many psychiatrists who had never treated a single patient with light therapy remained sceptical. On the other hand, the successful treatment of a single patient with this modality was in certain instances more persuasive than all the published data on the topic. So, after studying SAD for several years and treating many hundreds of patients with light therapy, I was amused when an old colleague approached me at a meeting and said to me with an air of discovery, ‘You know that light therapy that you have been talking about all this time? I treated a patient with it and the damn thing works.’
In truth, though, it is wonderful to discover a phenomenon for oneself even if it has been described a thousand times before. And so it was for me with the use of St John’s Wort in depression. I had read about controlled studies performed in Europe and had actually seen some of the data. Yet it was only when I saw some of my own patients benefit from the herbal remedy that I felt the excitement that might be expected to greet the arrival of a novel form of treatment for an old and nasty adversary – depression.
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