02/26/2024
Curing Schizophrenia -
Scientific battle' way of life for MD Abram Hoffer, 80, says he has been curing schizophrenia in some patients for decades - but the medical establishment has turned its back on his vitamin and nutrition-based program.
The biography of the author at the end of a recent article in The American Journal Of Natural Medicine makes it sound easy:
Dr. Abram Hoffer, "has published 16 books and over 600 medical and psychiatric papers. He worked with Dr. H. Osmond to bring the megavitamin theory and practice to the attention of the medical profession and the world. Dr. Hoffer is also the founder of the Journal Of Orthomolecular Medicine and president of the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation. His primary ambition is to 'restore schizophrenia to medicine as a treatable and curable disease.' "
The difficult part is that Hoffer, now 80 years old, says he has been curing schizophrenia in some patients for decades - but the medical establishment has turned its back on his vitamin and nutrition-based program.
He has spent most of his professional life, by his own account, "involved in a major scientific battle," that attracted such important allies as U.S. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling, English scientist Sir Julian Huxley and Ben Webster, a Canadian financier.
The Saskatchewan-born Hoffer is not wanting for adherents. He is regarded as a godfather of the natural medicine movement that is sweeping North America, catapulting such books as Spontaneous Healing, by Dr. Andrew Weil, to bestseller lists.
But at Toronto's Clarke division of the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health (formerly known as the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry), "nobody is doing direct work on (Hoffer's) niacin hypothesis," says Dr. Mary Seeman, who acknowledges that "it has indeed grown and evolved."
Not enough for the big guns to train their sights on it.
As Seeman says, "there would be nothing in it for the drug companies" to do research into vitamins.
Vitamins cannot be patented so there's no profit for drug companies.
Seeman, a professor of schizophrenia studies at the University of Toronto, agrees with Hoffer's statement that: "Today, even with the use of the latest, less toxic drugs, very few schizophrenics recover. They are improved, they are less agitated, but they do not become well. They never reach the stage where they can pay income tax and (each one) still costs the state up to $2 million over the 40-year expected life span of their illness."
"That's true," says Seeman, adding that schizophrenia "is a huge problem. More hospital beds are occupied by schizophrenics than by any other illness."
It is a disease that causes enormous pain to individuals and families, carries a terrible stigma and can be associated with violent behaviour.
Arguably the most expensive illness in Canada, schizophrenia affects one in 100 citizens and costs more than $4 billion a year through health and welfare expenditures.
According to Dr. Anne Bassett, a psychiatrist at the Queen St. site of the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health, "the new medications are only superior in terms of reduced side effects, but not in efficacy."
Bassett belongs to a new generation of doctors more interested in nutrition. "I did my psychiatric training at (the University of British Columbia) and I saw many of Dr. Hoffer's patients," she says. (Hoffer and his wife Rose moved to Victoria in the mid-'70s.)
Bassett says there is considerable scientific literature showing that "general nutrition is important (for schizophrenics), and folic acid and iron are important for brain functioning." She prescribes a multivitamin for many schizophrenic patients and says that people on anti-psychotic medication should be on Vitamin E.
She also points out that "Dr. Hoffer uses traditional anti-psychotic drugs."
Indeed he does. He started out in the mainstream in the 1950s, as the director of psychiatric research for Saskatchewan's department of public health, and as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan.
Like his medical peers, he was not - and is not - opposed to drugs; however a few seminal observations - schizophrenics do not become flushed when given niacin, or B-3, which causes intense flushing in most people - led him to explore the use of vitamins in large quantities.
He also experimented with L*D, "to find out what schizophrenia feels like," he says. More than 500 people volunteered - along with Hoffer - to participate in L*D experiments from 1952 to 1962, funded by the Saskatchewan government.
Hoffer's research and clinical work demonstrated, he says, that schizophrenics suffer from a chemical imbalance that can be corrected with what he terms "optimum" doses of vitamins in conjunction with proper diet.
(Bassett confirms the chemical imbalance theory. "It's as good an explanation as we've got.")
Hoffer's convictions are based on data from six "double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, on my personal observation of over 4,000 patients since 1952, on studies by my orthomolecular colleagues in the U.S. and Canada," he wrote in The American Journal Of Natural Medicine.
Today, he is a popular figure among a new generation of health care practitioners. He was brought to Toronto recently to address the graduating class of the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, which itself is expanding to meet demand, moving next year from the Yonge-Eglinton Centre, where it occupies two floors, to the former Seneca College campus opposite North York General Hospital.
"It's ironic," says college president David Schleich, "that Hoffer is a medical doctor whose research was done in hospitals within mainstream medicine and yet we (naturopathic doctors) are the ones incorporating his ideas."
Visiting Hoffer at the college was his former student Dr. Jozef Krop, who came to Canada from Poland as a young M.D. with a specialty in pediatrics.
"I went to study in Saskatoon in 1975-76 and Dr. Hoffer blew my mind," says Krop, who practises environmental medicine in Mississauga and pays close attention to the toxins and pollutants that he believes make many people sick.
In the '70s, Krop says, "I observed that Dr. Hoffer used the complementary approach, treating patients with general tiredness and chronic fatigue, and those with mental disorders, depression and schizophrenia.
He wasn't prescribing many drugs, instead he was using zinc, Vitamin C, niacin, B6. I said, 'Holy mackerel, what is this?' I had never heard of this. I said, 'Where can I read about this?' "
Hoffer recommended two books about vitamins and nutrition.
"I have never been the same since," Krop says. "I started to look at medicine totally differently."
For which he has paid a price: He has been under investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons since 1989 and is awaiting the results of a disciplinary hearing by the college to determine his competence and whether he can continue to practise medicine in Ontario.
"This is the last gasp of traditional medicine, in my opinion," says Miriam Hoffer, Dr. Hoffer's dietitian daughter, who works at Women's College Hospital and at Welcare, a private clinic.
She predicts that "Dr. Krop will be the last doctor harassed in this way. He practises clinical ecology and deals with many people with allergies. More and more people are seeking alternative approaches, and more and more doctors are prescribing vitamins."
Her brother, Dr. John Hoffer, an internist and researcher at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital and associate professor of medicine at McGill University, observes that their father has been attacked "for being a quack and a charlatan. It's annoying and it's not true."
"I believe in my father's work. I know it's controversial and it hasn't reached the standard of proof (required by science) because it hasn't been researched enough."
John Hoffer, who has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in nutrition, points out that his father went into medicine with a Ph.D. in biochemistry.
"He didn't have a Freudian bias. He was interested from the beginning in the biochemistry of mental illness, which made him unique."
One of the reasons his father's results haven't been replicated in other settings, John says, is that back in the '50s in Saskatchewan, Abram Hoffer had control of his patients.
"They came from small communities, they were admitted to mental hospitals, and they did what he said. Megavitamin treatment doesn't work magically, overnight, like drugs. My dad's holistic approach is aimed at healing. It's long term. It's not a chemical straight jacket, like Haldol. Orthomolecular psychiatry, Hoffer's specialty, was named by two-time Nobel laureate Pauling, a professor at Stanford University when he coined the word "orthomolecular" for a 1968 article on Hoffer in the American journal Science.
As Hoffer explains in his book Orthomolecular Nutrition, " 'Ortho' means to straighten. Pauling wanted to convey the basic idea that many mental illnesses could be corrected by straightening out, in effect, the concentration of specific molecules in the brain, so as to provide the optimum molecular environment for the mind."
But few scientists have been as open to Hoffer's ideas as Pauling, who pioneered the use of large doses of vitamin C, long before other vitamins - such as E for the prostate, the heart, and early Alzheimer's - were proven to be effective.
Hoffer pays acute attention to nutrition, asking patients to fast, then testing them for food allergies.
He writes that "a daily dosage schedule may include 4 grams of B3, 4 grams of C, 800 milligrams of B6, 1,000 international units of E, and other vitamins indicated by the test results . . . Special diets form the real basis of therapy."
But everyone is different, he cautions, and treatment must be customized. "What works for me might not work for you."
Today, orthomolecular medicine is being applied to a host of conditions afflicting aging baby boomers, from cancer to heart disease and neurological illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, to degenerative joint diseases and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Hoffer's dietary rules are simple: *Eat whole foods - an orange, not the juice. *Avoid "white" foods such as white rice or white bread. *Avoid sugar and junk food. *Avoid dairy products if you're allergic to them, as he is.
Other than that, he says the most important thing is to "enjoy your food."
He eats meat, french fries (occasionally) and apple pie.
He insists: "I'm not a rebel."
Indeed, he has been criticized for using conventional drug therapies, tranquillizers and antidepressants, and for prescribing electro-convulsive shock therapy, which he says has helped some people.
In person, Hoffer is a good advertisement for what he preaches.
Born and raised on the family farm near Hoffer, Sask., six miles north of the intersection of North Dakota and Montana, he is a fit octogenarian, walking and talking with the energy and elan of a much younger man.
He is sanguine about the negative attitude of the establishment: "I'm not paranoid," he says.
And his understanding of medical history teaches him that "it takes about 40 years for medical breakthroughs to be embraced."
If you've got a better idea, he says he'd be delighted to know about it.
If you could prove him wrong, he'd change his mind in an instant.
"I tell people, 'You don't have to believe me. Come and see what I'm doing.' "
