Welcome to Natural MD Radio, your place to hear the whole truth on health and medicine for women and children and get the tools you need to take back your health naturally starting now. I'm Dr. Aviva Rong. The statistics on depression in women is staggering and it only seems to be continuing to grow.

Women experience major depression twice as often as men do.

And depending on the studies that you look at

between one in four and one in six women of childbearing age is on an

antidepressant. Women are actually two and a half times more likely than men to be on

an antidepressant and the fact is for about 50% of women who try them they never get benefit and

after a year of being on them even women who got benefit in the first few months

60% show no improvement in their

symptoms one year later. We also know that not all of us want to be on

antidepressant medications so if you're struggling with depression,

you might be looking for an alternative.

One of my favorite herbs, Turmeric,

has actually been shown to be beneficial in depression and what I love about this is

two things one it shows that not only can we use herbal remedies as alternatives to

a lot of the medications that we think we need to be dependent on, but it also shines a light

on one of the important facts about depression that most of us have not been informed of.

We have been taught as a culture that depression is a

chemical imbalance, that it's a result of us being kind of quote unquote

deficient in chemicals called neurotransmitters like

serotonin and nor epinephrine which these medications keep prolonged in

our circulation so that they can have more of an impact on our nerve

endings and improve our mood. Now what we do know about depression is that it's not actually a neurotransmitter deficiency and most of the theories

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