How Did We Get Here?
Did you know Americans spend 18% of GDP on healthcare? $12,530 per person. Ninety percent goes to chronic illnesses. Yet life expectancy and birth rates are dropping. How did we get here?
No doubt with the best intentions to spur innovation for the greater good, Senators Birch Bayh (D) and Bob Dole (R) introduced legislation to promote the commercial use of federally funded research, which had often languished in government archives. Passed in 1980, The Bayh-Dole Act allows universities and non-profits to patent and license inventions, sharing revenue with individual researchers, thus fostering entrepreneurship in academia.
The Act dramatically increased university patent filings and technology transfer. Notable examples include MIT’s lithium-ion battery technology, Stanford’s PageRank, the foundation of Google’s search engine, and Genentech, one of the first biotechnology companies.
The Bayh-Dole Act also resulted in massive financial gains for pharmaceutical companies. Blockbuster drugs—those generating over $1 billion annually—Humira, Prozac, and Seroquel exemplify the revenue potential that now drives pharmaceutical research.
This profit motive favors pharmaceutical research over studies of natural therapies that cannot be patented. Funding for research into their use comes from NIH grants or philanthropies. Researchers must build strong cases for the public health impact of their work to secure funding.
Metabolic psychiatry is in this category. It doesn’t preclude medication but can reduce or eliminate the need for it. By supporting proper metabolism and mitochondrial function, its natural interventions, including a ketogenic diet, shift the treatment paradigm from lifelong symptom management to total healing. Given the number of people needlessly suffering – one billion worldwide, with 41 million in the US – the potential public health impact is profound.
Despite a growing body of evidence that the ketogenic diet is a uniquely powerful tool for relieving psychiatric symptoms, research into it – necessary for broad implementation – would scarcely exist if not for the Baszucki Group.
Dr. Deanna Kelly has worked in schizophrenia research and care for 27 years. In June, her privately funded, carefully crafted, inpatient study to evaluate the effects of ketogenic therapy on schizophrenia was inexplicably halted by Maryland’s Health Secretary, underscoring the precarious nature of funding for non-commercializable research.
Metabolic psychiatry has the power to prevent unnecessary suffering. The need for more research is critical. Click below to help drive further studies and advancements in this field (in less than one minute). Thank you for your support!
Hat tip to Brett Smith, @MyMetabolicLife, for highlighting Bayh-Dole as one of many factors contributing to our current situation
Learn more about Dr. Kelly's cancelled study here: https://www.metabolicmind.org/news/the-baltimore-sun-why-is-...
