Alternative Brain Tonics
Coenzyme Q10 has been proposed as a brain tonic, but there are hardly any systematic studies with this compound. Other natural substances with possible promemory properties include gotu-kola, holly, calamus root, bhringaraj, and haritaki. Some of these traditional medications have been used for hundreds of years, while others are of more recent vintage. There are only anecdotal data to support their use as promemory agents.
Alternative Medications: Facts
Among the current alternative medications, only ginkgo biloba has established cognitiveenhancing properties, though its effect is small in magnitude.
You should consider taking 120 mg daily of EGb 761 (ginkgo biloba) as one of the medications in your memory program.
More solid clinical evidence about the promemory properties of ginseng, melatonin, and other alternative agents is needed before they can be recommended for regular use.
Phosphatidylserine (PS) is sold in health food stores. Some consider it to be an alternative medication because it is a naturally occurring substance, while others classify it as a pharmaceutical medication because an Italian drug company conducted the initial research with
this compound. Phosphatidylserine is an important option in the Memory Program, and you will learn about its effects in a later chapter.
CHAPTER 16
Antioxidants
Vitamin E
A few years ago, a visiting speaker at our weekly departmental presentation praised the virtues of vitamin E as a potential treatment for several neurologic and psychiatric disorders, and as a general antiaging therapy. At the end of his talk, Dr. Jack Gorman, one of my colleagues who likes to occupy the front row, rose to his full height of six feet three inches and asked the speaker how much vitamin E he took daily. The speaker turned the question around and asked Jack how much he took daily. Jack immediately replied, “Four hundred international units.”Jack is certainly not alone in this; many physicians, including yours truly, ingest a vitamin E capsule daily. In fact, the average daily dose of vitamin E has likely risen from 400 to 800 international units (IUs) daily among physicians, attesting to their growing faith in the antiaging properties of vitamin E.
Physicians Who Take Vitamin E
Doctors are notoriously bad patients, but they are often ahead of the curve when it comes to preserving their own health, as many are now doing with vitamin E. Remember how common it was for doctors to smoke in the 1950s and 1960s? At that time, many doctors were regular smokers in the United States, with even higher numbers in most other countries. But once the findings emerged on the links between smoking and both lung cancer and heart disease, many doctors quit smoking. Nowadays, barely 10 percent of physicians are regular smokers, the lowest proportion among the major professions. Similarly, while the number of overweight people keeps ballooning in the United States, physicians have reduced their own dietary intake of saturated fats. Physicians have finally become good at following their own advice, and statistics show that on average they live nearly five years longer than the rest of the population, despite constant exposure to infections and
other diseases, long working hours, and high stress levels.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
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