How the AMA Erased the Anxiety Treatment American Doctors Used for Eighty-Six Years
A retired University of Michigan anthropologist spent seven years living with Sami women in arctic Norway. What she learned about anxiety in women over 50 was already in American medical textbooks. Until 1936.
In July 2024, in a kitchen in Royal Oak, Michigan, a husband asked his wife the question he had been carrying for eight months. He wanted to know whether her medications were doing what they were supposed to be doing. She had been on a four-medication psychiatric protocol for three years. Lexapro at thirty milligrams. Klonopin at half a milligram. Buspirone three times daily. Trazodone at bedtime. Her GAD-7 score, taken at Beaumont Royal Oak in March 2022, had been fourteen. One point below severe.
The medications had reduced her symptoms by approximately fifty percent. The 3:14 AM wake-ups continued. The dread in her chest, on a ten-point scale, had dropped from a seven to a four. The four was still a four. She had stopped going to her yoga class. She had stopped visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts on Sunday afternoons. She had stopped gardening on Saturday mornings. The things that used to bring her back to herself had become flat.
She told her husband they would talk about it. They did not talk about it. He carried the question for the next eight months. So did she.
What follows is the story of how she found her answer, and what that answer reveals about a small decision the American Medical Association made in 1936 that almost no one outside of medical history scholarship remembers.
An exhibition at the Pewabic Pottery
In February of this year, Sarah received a postcard from the Detroit Institute of Arts. A small gallery opening at the Pewabic Pottery on East Jefferson Avenue. The exhibition was titled The Arctic Threshold: Sami Textile and Material Practice. It was curated by Dr. Patricia Marquette, a retired University of Michigan anthropologist who had spent seven years in the 1990s doing fieldwork with a single family in Kautokeino, Norway.
Sarah went on a Friday night in March. She was looking at a glass case displaying three small leather cords, each strung with two stones. The card said they had been worn by women in the Sara family of Kautokeino in 1924, 1956, and 1987.
Dr. Marquette walked over.
They sat on a bench in the corner of the gallery. Dr. Marquette rolled up her cuff. On the inside of her left wrist was a leather cord. Paired obsidian and black tourmaline stones. Antique brass spacers. The leather was worn smooth where it had been pressing into her skin for thirty-two years.
Then she said the thing that has now occupied the attention of two-dozen midwestern primary care doctors, three independent research librarians, and an unknown number of women in their fifties who have been quietly tapering from long-term psychiatric protocols.
What the European epidemiology shows
For forty years, peer-reviewed European epidemiological literature has documented a disparity that has not been satisfactorily explained. Sami women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies have approximately one-fourth the prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder that American women of the same age have. They have one-fifth the prevalence of major depression. They have one-eighth the prevalence of insomnia.
The disparity does not track to genetics. It does not track to diet. It does not track to physical activity. It does not track to social support. Multiple investigators have tested these variables and ruled them out. The disparity persists.
What the disparity does track to is a practice. Sami women in this age range have been wearing a particular paired-stone cord on the inside of the left wrist for approximately nine hundred years. The practice originated in trade contact with Anatolian merchants around the year 1090. It has been preserved through every Sami generation since.
What is more notable, from the perspective of American medical history, is that the practice was not unknown to American physicians. It was in their primary reference text.
The U.S. Dispensatory, 1850 to 1936
The U.S. Dispensatory was the standard American pharmacopoeia from 1833 to 1973. Generations of American physicians consulted it for indications, dosing, and contraindications. Between 1850 and 1936, every edition included the paired-stone wrist cord under the indication "nervous exhaustion in women of the climacteric."
The recommended placement was the inside of the left wrist, where the radial pulse runs. The recommended stones were obsidian and black tourmaline, bound with leather. The recommended wear duration was continuous, with a typical effect window of sixty to ninety days from first wear.
In 1936, the entry was removed. The removal was not preceded by clinical trials demonstrating ineffectiveness. It was not preceded by reports of adverse outcomes. It was a business decision made by a committee at a moment when the pharmaceutical industry was consolidating around patentable chemical compounds, and non-patentable mineral interventions were quietly being struck from the reference texts that prescribers consulted.
The decision affected an estimated one in eight American women of the period, who would otherwise have been prescribed the intervention by their family physicians. For the eighty-six years since, American physicians have not been trained to prescribe it. Most have not been trained to know it existed.
What the mechanism appears to be
The mechanism has been studied piecemeal across more than a century.
The current, delivered at the inside of the wrist where the radial nerve runs near the surface, appears to stimulate the vagus nerve. Vagus nerve stimulation, well documented in conventional cardiology and increasingly in psychiatry, downregulates the autonomic nervous system. A downregulated autonomic nervous system stops producing the cortisol cascade that is the somatic floor of what American clinicians now call generalized anxiety disorder.
None of this is wellness-industry speculation. It is conventional electrophysiology. The mechanism was sufficiently understood in 1880 that the chair of the National Academy of Sciences gave Pierre Curie the Nobel Prize for measuring it. The intervention was sufficiently understood in 1936 that the AMA had to make a decision about whether to keep recommending it.
What Sarah did next
Dr. Marquette reached into a leather bag. She pulled out a small leather pouch. Inside were two leather cords, each with paired obsidian and black tourmaline stones. Antique brass. New.
She told Sarah that the practice has always been a matched-pair practice across spouses, and that Daniel had been carrying his question for eight months, and that Sarah was going to drive home and tie the second cord on him at her own kitchen table within two hours. She tied the first cord on Sarah's left wrist.
Sarah drove home with the second cord on the passenger seat. She walked into her kitchen at 9:54 PM. Daniel was reading at the counter. She handed him the muslin-wrapped package. She told him what was inside. He set down his book. He held out his left wrist. She tied the cord on him.
He cried at the kitchen counter for the next twenty minutes. He had not cried in front of her since his mother's funeral in 2015.
What happened over the following ninety days
What this practice is, and what it is not
It is a paired-stone leather cord. It is not a medication. It does not require a prescription. It does not require cessation of an existing protocol. Most women who wear it continue their current medications. Some women, with their physician's supervision, reduce their dose over time. Some women stay on the same dose and report feeling different. The cord supports the autonomic nervous system that conventional medications cannot fully reach. It does not interact with serotonin reuptake. It does not interact with GABA receptors. It does not interact with any conventional pharmacological mechanism.
It is, in short, the thing the AMA decided to stop recommending in 1936, and which has been preserved continuously by women in arctic Norway, and which is now being quietly reintroduced in a leather pouch by a retired anthropologist and an unknown number of midwestern primary care doctors.
How much longer
Sarah is one of an undetermined number of women in the upper Midwest who have, in the last twelve months, quietly tapered from long-term psychiatric protocols using this practice. Their PCPs are aware. Their psychiatrists, in most cases, are not. The practice is not a treatment for GAD in the regulatory sense. It is the recovery of an intervention that was in American medicine for eighty-six years before a 1936 committee removed it for reasons that were not clinical.
If you have been on a multi-medication psychiatric protocol for one to fourteen years. If your symptoms have improved by approximately fifty percent and not more. If you have started to wonder whether you will be on these medications for the rest of your life. The question Sarah's husband asked her in July 2024 may already be in your own kitchen.
Close this page. Continue the medication protocol that has produced approximately fifty percent symptom reduction over the previous one to fourteen years. Wait, as Sarah did for three years, for a change that the protocol has not produced.
Order the cord. Wear it for ninety days. Return it for a full refund if your body has not shifted. Most women keep wearing it and pass the second one to a husband, a sister, a daughter, or a yoga instructor.