This psychiatrist didn’t believe 3 claims made by Truehope

Dr. Charles W. Popper, MD, a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist with Harvard Medical School, once testified in a court trial when Health Canada took Truehope Nutritional Support to court to force them to stop selling and distributing EMPowerplus to Canadians.

During part of his testimony, Dr. Popper outlines 3 claims Truehope made when they first contacted him, which made him quite skeptical of the company and its products.

1. 80% success rate among bipolar patients.

“But as I listened to them, they made some claims about this treatment that struck me as pretty obviously ridiculous. For one thing, they said that this treatment would effectively treat around 80 percent of bipolar patients. 80 percent just struck me as wrong, inflated, unlikely. There was nothing in psychiatry that was even looking in that general direction. So, their claim of an 80 percent response rate struck me as bogus. False.”

2. Patients could see improvement in 5 days.

“Their second claim . . . was that when they treated patients who were not previously on psychiatric medications with this EMPower stuff, that they could see clinical improvement within 5 days. Now, we don’t have anything in psychiatry that works that fast, so for them to say that they can start a treatment and 5 days later see an improvement struck me as ridiculous. In my own mind, I was thinking, “You know, that’s strike two. That’s just two strong claims they’re making that are obviously false.”

3. EMPowerplus amplifies effects of psychiatric drugs

“Then they had a third claim: that when you give the EMPowerplus to patients already on psychiatric drugs that the vitamins and minerals amplify the effects of the psychiatric drugs to such a degree that you had to lower the doses or otherwise the patients would get sick or side effects from their psychiatric drugs. Well, [there’s] nothing like that, no suggestive data even slightly in that direction in the field of psychiatry; nothing. So, I had a very clear response to that one. That one to me was strike three.“

Through a series of events, Dr. Popper began to see success with one of his patients using EMPowerplus. He eventually started using it with other patients. In fact, by the time he had testified at the trial, he had already treated 150 of his own patients with EMPowerplus and consulted on an additional 500 patients using EMPowerplus.

So, how did his experience with EMPowerplus affect his opinion of it and the claims Truehope made earlier?

As I began to work with other patients, and seeing that it worked, and getting more experience, I found several things.

One was those 3 strikes. It did look like about an 80% response rate. For the people that went on EMPowerplus who were not previously on medications, they did show a response within a small number of days, faster than Lithium, faster than the drugs. And most baffling, that when we added EMPowerplus to a psychiatric regime, that they would get flooded with side effects of the psychiatric medications that they were on, and that we really had to reduce the doses of conventional psychiatric medications.

So, all 3 strikes, . . . all 3 of them were true.

And over the years, subsequently, that I’ve been working with it, those initial findings that were being described . . . , they’ve all held out.

It took me a very long time to not be extremely suspicious of the treatment. But it was so consistent. And, you know, the way [I] do it now differs very, very slightly from the method that I understand they use at Truehope. But in essence, what they were describing was absolutely right.

Read the entire testimony that Dr. Popper provided at his trial.