The following account of Dr. Charles Popper’s initial experience with EMPowerplus is taken from testimony he gave as an expert witness in Truehope’s 2006 court victory over Health Canada. He testified that up to that time, he had assisted 100–150 of his own patients and consulted with other doctors on 300–500 more patients in the use of EMPowerplus.
Dr. Popper had been working with a young patient who had bipolar. Because of extenuating circumstances, he had reluctantly put the child on EMPowerplus, using a bottle Truehope reps had left with him earlier when they had visited him about the product.
The father called a couple of days later and said, “You know, we ran out of the EMPowerplus. The bottles didn’t arrive. And so, the kid’s been off.” And he called me at the 48-hour point and he said, “The tantrums are back full force.”
So, I said, “Jeez, well, you know, we can get conventional psychiatric medications going now…or if you want, you can wait for when the bottle arrives and you can retry the stuff;” although I was definitely leaning toward conventional treatment. And they said, no, they wanted to wait. The stuff had been shipped. It should be arriving any day.
Well, it was the Christmas season. The package must have gotten lost in the mail. The kid continued with these temper tantrums every day for about a week.
The family was about to go on vacation. They didn’t know what to do. The stuff hadn’t arrived. I had a list of the ingredients by that point, and I said, “Look, I’ll tell you what. I’m going to go our local health foods store and start pulling ingredients off the shelf to try to approximate some mix of what was in the EMPowerplus formula.”
It’s not that I believed it; it’s just that they were going to wait anyway, so, I may as well at least try to get some portion of that vitamin/mineral treatment to them.
I went to the health food store and frankly sort of made a scene by buying a hundred bottles to try and get the various ingredients in the right forms and to try and get a reasonable balance. I bought up the pile of bottles. I gave them to my friend and said, “You know, why don’t you try those? It’s the best we can do.” I said to myself, “This is totally ridiculous.”
So they gave the kid this…mess of pills. They called me from vacation to say, “This is not like the original formula, but he’s about 60% better than he was, and that’s making the vacation workable.”
That was the first time I began to believe that maybe there was something to this—maybe.
They came back from their vacation. The package still hadn’t arrived. He went back to school and interestingly, the teachers said that he was about 60% better, entirely on their own.
A few days after that, the package arrived. The child went back on EMPowerplus, and the father called me 4 days later and said the tantrums were gone—totally gone.
Dr. Popper has been using EMPowerplus in his private practice since 2000, and he published a commentary on EMPowerplus in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 2001.