Now , he very quickly moved from that animal model into human patients and started injecting human patients with lithium or providing lithium orally to those patients . And lo and behold , found an absolutely profound and positive effect of lithium in reducing symptoms of mania . And as all good physician scientists do , he wrote up his results and he wrote it up in a paper entitled lithium Salts and the treatment of psychotic excitement .
This is a lot of details , but this is important because what he eventually found is that when he diluted the uric acid with lithium and created lithium ate , lithium ate could actually calm down these guinea pigs that were injected with the toxic urea . He also found that lithium ate , had a generally calming effect on these guinea pigs . So now we're really off in crazy territory , right .
Cade was a good scientist in addition to being a good physician and by good scientists , I mean that he did control experiments here . He was injecting lithium rate into animals and see an effect . But he knew that that solution of lithium ate contained not just the uric acid but it also contained lithium .
The discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder is truly a miraculous story that I think everyone should know . The key player in this story is a physician by the last name Cade .
But he knew that that solution of lithium ate contained not just the uric acid but it also contained lithium . And so he quite appropriately asked , maybe the lithium alone is having this calming effect on these guinea pigs . And indeed , that was the case when he did the proper control experiment and injected only lithium solution into these guinea pigs .
