Hamilton, Ontario — April 10, 2001: a recorded two-hour EMPowerplus pitch to psychiatric patients, the harassment campaign that followed, and where the presenter operates today
On the evening of April 10, 2001, David E. Gilbert stood before forty to fifty people in an auditorium at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. He had been introduced by the president of the hospital's Mood Disorders Support Group as a “research assistant with the Synergy Group of Canada.” The audience was largely psychiatric patients and their families — people living with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, clinical depression, fibromyalgia, anxiety disorders, and ADHD.
Gilbert was not a doctor, and not a researcher in any credentialed sense — a fact he acknowledged himself later in the evening when asked about medication management: “I'm not a doctor and I cannot and will not prescribe increases or decreases in medications.” And yet, for two hours, he did something that looked very much like medical counselling to a room full of some of the most vulnerable people in the mental health system: pitching EMPowerplus, a vitamin-mineral supplement made by the Synergy Group (later Truehope Nutritional Support), as capable of bringing about remission from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, fibromyalgia, ADHD, autism, and Tourette's syndrome — by gradually weaning patients off their prescribed psychiatric medications.
Not one of these claims was supported by published, peer-reviewed evidence at the time. Health Canada halted university-based research on the product in January 2002, citing a lack of scientific basis. The RCMP raided Truehope's Alberta headquarters in 2003.
The most alarming thread in the recording is the medication-reduction protocol. Gilbert described, in clinical detail, guiding patients off prescribed psychiatric medications — antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers — while on the supplement, monitoring them through weekly “symptom summary sheets” patients phoned in to him personally. He described patients coming off Celexa, Epival (valproic acid), Zyprexa (olanzapine), and monthly depot antipsychotic injections, all under his own guidance rather than necessarily the prescribing physician's. He described a patient once “slated to go to Brockville Psychiatric Institute for permanent placement” being redirected to a group home instead; a 19-year-old schizophrenic patient having her Zyprexa reduced from 20mg to 13.75mg; and a 3.5-year-old child with “severe eating disorder and autism-like symptoms” being given the supplement through various delivery tricks.
Audience memberShould people just stop their medications and switch to this supplement?
David Gilbert“Absolutely not. It's absolutely not safe. The last thing we want is somebody dumping their meds and going onto this.”
That disclaimer sat inside a two-hour presentation that otherwise made the medication-reduction process sound routine, well-managed, and inevitable — because, Gilbert claimed, the supplement would eventually make the medications unnecessary.
One of the most telling exchanges of the evening came when a skeptical audience member pressed Gilbert on the foundational claim that the formula traced back to research on mineral supplementation for “ear and tail biting syndrome” in pigs.
Audience member“When I first heard about this group, I sent some emails out to about a dozen different veterinary colleges around the world, and no one has ever heard of mineral supplementations for the tail-biting syndrome. So how did this feed salesman or biochemical salesman from southern Alberta, from a small town, come up with this pig theory?”
David Gilbert“That answer I don't have that I can get for you. If you want to give me an e-mail, then I can get the office a call.”
A supplement marketed for serious psychiatric conditions, pitched to a room full of vulnerable patients, whose foundational origin story could not be substantiated by a dozen veterinary departments worldwide — and the company's own “medical liaison” had no answer. This is the question at the heart of Pig Pills, Inc.
St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton is a major, credentialed Catholic health care institution — not a convention centre, hotel ballroom, or community centre. The use of its auditorium, and Gilbert's introduction by the president of its own Mood Disorders Support Group, lent the pitch an institutional legitimacy it could not have created on its own. Whether hospital administration was aware of the specifics of what was being presented under its name isn't established by the recording — but the same presentation, given in a rented hotel meeting room, would have read very differently to the patients in that audience.
Twenty-one months after that evening in Hamilton, the pattern of intimidation documented below had already reached Dr. Polevoy personally. On January 25, 2003, Terry appeared on Peter Warren's weekend program on AM 980 CFPL (Corus Radio Network) to discuss an EMPowerplus case then in the news — a man with chronic schizophrenia, off his medication in favor of the supplement, had just been found not criminally responsible for a crime committed while off it.
The interview's second half turned to Truman Tuck, a perennial political candidate from Belleville, Ontario, self-described as a paralegal though he had never attended law school. Terry told listeners that in the twenty-four hours before the broadcast, Tuck's campaign against him had sharpened into a direct threat aimed at his medical license. Tuck ran close to a dozen affiliated websites built on a shared template, each carrying a section devoted to attacking Terry personally — and was now working with a Virginia-based operator named John Hamill, whose site promoted itself under a “Freedom of Natural Health” banner, to solicit $1,500 per donor toward funding either a civil suit or a criminal complaint against Terry.
Terry drew the parallel himself, live on air: this was the same playbook Tim Bolen had already run, writing letters to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in an attempt to have Terry's fitness to practise medicine called into question over his criticism of Hulda Clark's Tijuana cancer clinic. Tuck, Terry said, had also aligned himself with Leo Reghier — identified on air as Hulda Clark's brother, based somewhere in British Columbia or Alberta — tying the harassment campaign directly back into the Clark network.
The story of Truehope/Synergy after that April 2001 evening is, in many ways, the story of the entire book in miniature — a company that made sweeping claims to vulnerable patients, faced regulatory action, won in court, abandoned the science it claimed to be pursuing, and responded to critics with legal threats.
Health Canada eventually moved to stop Truehope from distributing EMPowerplus without a Drug Identification Number, on the grounds that the therapeutic claims being made brought the product within the definition of a “drug” under the Food and Drugs Act. Truehope fought back — and won. The court found that Truehope had been “overwhelmingly compelled to disobey” the DIN regulation in order to protect patients who had come to depend on the product. Truehope now displays excerpts from that ruling prominently on its own website as a marketing tool.
In that Hamilton auditorium, Gilbert promised the double-blind study would be published in The Lancet, that Alberta was about to cover the product under its provincial drug plan, and that full regulatory approval was “a year to a year and a half” away. The randomized controlled trial of EMPowerplus for bipolar disorder was eventually terminated in 2009 — eight years later — without producing the evidence Gilbert had described as imminent. The Lancet publication never happened. The Alberta drug plan coverage never materialized.
When critics wrote about EMPowerplus, Truehope's response was consistent: legal threats. Marvin Ross's article in The Scientist prompted a threat to sue the magazine if it didn't remove the piece — the magazine refused. An anonymous 2012 email to Ron Reinhold claimed criminal charges had been filed against him, Polevoy, and Ross, and told him to move his website “offshore.” In 2013–2014, mental health writer Natasha Tracy was threatened with a defamation suit over critical articles about EMPowerplus; she refused to remove her posts and was never sued. The pattern is the same in each case: not engagement with the substance of the criticism, but an attempt to silence the critic.
Twenty-five years after that evening in Hamilton, David Gilbert is still in business. EcoSys Wellness Center, operating in Nepean, Ottawa, lists Gilbert as its sole practitioner. The product mix has evolved — Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT/“tapping”), pulsed magnetic resonance stimulation devices, and a supplement called “Equilib.” That last item is not incidental: Equilib is one of the direct corporate successors to EMPowerplus, following the Synergy → Evince → Equilib lineage. The conditions being addressed — depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, sleep disorders — are the same conditions Gilbert was pitching solutions for at St. Joseph's Hospital in 2001.
A testimonial on the EcoSys website is attributed to “Dr. Alan Schwartz,” described as operating a “medical clinic” where Gilbert treated over forty patients over eight consecutive days. A search of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario's public register finds no physician named Alan Schwartz ever licensed to practise medicine in Ontario, and no other Canadian provincial register shows one either.
The conditions that allowed the Total Health Show and the Synergy Group to operate for decades remain in place today — on TikTok, Instagram, and Canadian cable. David Gilbert's EcoSys Wellness Center is perhaps the most concrete single illustration of that argument: not an analogy, not a structural parallel, but the same person, still operating, a quarter century later.
This event is one of the central primary-source investigations behind Pig Pills, Inc., co-authored by Dr. Terry Polevoy, Marvin Ross, and Ron Reinhold — the definitive exposé of EMPowerplus, the Synergy Group, and the extraordinary claims made for a nutraceutical sold to bipolar patients in Canada and the U.S., over the objections of Health Canada.