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IMPORTANT:  Information provided is intended for educational purposes and is not intended to be medical advice nor offered as a prescription, diagnosis or treatment for any disease, illness, infirmity or physical condition. Always consult your own medical provider about your health and medical questions before making any health related decision. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration.

2006 Orthomolecular Hall of Fame Inductee Dr Abram Hoffer MD, was a Canadian biochemist, physician, and psychiatrist known for his “adrenochrome hypothesis” of schizoaffective disorders. He conducted the first double blind, placebo controlled studies in the history of psychiatry.

The Mayo Clinic successfully replicated and validated Dr Hoffer’s niacin protocol, for normalizing dangerous cholesterol levels.  A fact sadly forgotten as coronary heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide at 8.8 Million deaths per year (as of 2015).

Dr Hoffer’s niacin protocol successfully “cured” over 5000 of his schizophrenia patients over his career. Incidentally, about 10% of Dr Hoffer’s patients had cancer. Apparently, Dr Hoffer’s niacin protocol resolved the cancers as well.

Dr Hoffer’s Biography, Publications, References

Video Index

Niacin in Prevention / Treatment of

Heart Disease

Niacin Regulates Cholesterol For 7$ a Month, Repairs Arteries 2m 23s

Mayo Clinic Confirmed Niacin Fixed Cholesterol in Their “Untreatable” Patients 58s

Cancer

2 Cases Ovarian Cancer, U. Kansas Med School teaches Vitamin C & Chemo, Dr Riordan MD 1m 35s

Mayo Clinic VS Pauling Cancer Trials1m 51s

Cancer, 1st Case Study, Lung, 1 Month to Live 3m 29s

Cancer, 2nd Case Study, Pancreas, 6 Months to Live 1m 51s

Cancer, 3rd Case Study, Sarcoma of the Hip, Triathlete facing amputation 1m 30s

Study of his Cancer Patients at Linus Pauling’s Request 1m 55s

Alcoholism and Drug Addiction

Niacin and Alcoholism, Cofounder of AA Took Niacin For The Rest of his Life 2m 15s

Drug Addicts Recover on Vitamin C & Niacin, No Withdrawal Symptoms 1m 08s

Alcohol and Drug Addiction, 80% Success Rate AA + Vitamins 2m 29s

Schizophrenia

1st Case Study (Dying Catatonic Schizophrenic Saved) 2m 15s

Definition of Curing Schizophrenia, 17 Psychotics Became MDs 3m 32s

How Many of your Schizophrenic Patients Pay Income Tax? 18 Personal Accounts, 500 Published Papers 1m 36s

Schizophrenia Case Study, 60g a Day 3m 07s

Many Violent Criminals Are Actually Schizophrenic – 8 Case Studies 9m 05s

Supplements VS Conventional Drug Treatments

Suicide, Weight Gain & Other Dangerous Side Effects From Antipsychotics 2m 45s

Schizophrenics Take Vitamins, No Harsh Side Effects, Clozapine Case Study 2m 17s

Vitamins Outperform Schizophrenia Treatment (Which Hasn’t Improved in 55 years) 3m 20s

Self Treatment, Safety of Vitamins VS Danger of Drugs 3m 04s

Nutrients vs Drugs, Synthetic vs Natural Vitamin C 2m 41s

Horizontal VS Vertical Medicine. Conventional Medicine is Great For Surgery, Terrible For Illness 40s

Counter Arguments

Not Scientifically Proven?

1st Double Blind Study in History of Psychiatry 2m 24s

Why Published Double Blind Studies Have Been Ignored for 50 years 4m 54s

Patent System Failure – No Money, No Development of Treatments 38s

100M$ to Prove Use to FDA, Allows Unsafe Drugs but not Safe Nutrients 1m 18s

Why Don’t all Doctors use it?

How Come Every Doctor Isn’t Using It? Pt1 1m 48s

How Come Every Doctor Isn’t Using It? Pt2 2m 13s

Doctors Not Taught Nutrition, 1950s Essential. Nobel Prizes For Vitamins 2m 10s

Modern Medicine Is a Religion and not a Science, We are the Heretics 2m 47s

Practice of the Community – Can’t Demand Treatment Type 27s

Public Must Demand Doctors Be Taught About Vitamins 33s

Medical Inertia

Medical Inertia, Years Before Folic Acid Accepted to Prevent Spina Bifida (Protrusion of Spine) 1m 53s

Medical Inertia, Shute Brothers, Vitamin E & Heart Disease, Cures Huntington’s 1m 23s

How it works

Schizophrenia & Adrenochrome, Niacin & Vitamin C to reduce oxidized adrenaline 1m 19s

LSD Creates Schizophrenia Like Experience – Vitamin B6 & Zinc 2m 20s

Irwin Stone & Linus Pauling’s intro to vitamin therapy 4m 48s

Determining Dosage

Tailoring Schizophrenia Treatment – B3, vitamin C & more 1m 19s

Vitamin B3 Types & Uses, Niacin, Niacinamide,  Inositol Niacinate 1m 40s

Niacin Safety 1, No Danger But Must Warn About Flush 2m 33s

Niacin Safety 2, Oldest Canadian Took For 41 Years, No Effect On Coagulation 1m 16s

Food Allergies, Nutritional Causes and Remedies

Nutrition Pt 1, Food Allergies Cause Syndromes,  Depression, Anxiety, Schizophrenia, OCD, MS 55s

Nutrition Pt 2, Evolution of Food Supply, Needs Vary, Learn, Adapt or Die 3m 54s

Nutrition Pt 3, Hoffer’s Rule 1 – Eliminate sugar 1m 32s

Nutrition Pt 4, Hoffer’s Rule 2 –  Find Out What Are They Allergic To 2m 33s

Nutrition Pt 5, She Was Allergic To Everything – General Allergies Caused By Milk 1m 55s

Other

About Andrew Saul & Doctoryourself.com 1m 18s

Lighter Side of Dr Hoffer (Interview Interruption) 19s

 

 

 

Dr Abram Hoffer MD – Videos & Transcripts

Niacin in Prevention / Treatment of

Heart Disease

Niacin Regulates Cholesterol For 7$ a Month, Repairs Arteries

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“It’s the side effects, what I don’t like about drugs is the side effects. If they had drugs without side effects that would be great.

– That’d be vitamins!

Well, they should!

But there’s no money in vitamins, whose gonna make money out of vitamins?

I’ll give you an example.

If you have high blood cholesterol, I can bring it down for 7$ a month niacin. But the doctors won’t do that, they’ll give you statin that’ll cost 100$ a month.

Which don’t do it nearly as well!

Because the statin is strongly, is heavily advertised. The doctor knows about it. The doctor does not know enough about niacin.

So we have these natural products which are extremely effective, but they’re not being used. They don’t teach it in medical school. They don’t learn about it.

They don’t read about it in the magazines. So it’s a terrible situation.

– Vitamin C helps rebuild the collagen of the blood vessels?

Yeah

– Clearing out the cholesterol, where does the niacin tie in?

I think Niacin does it better, because niacin brings down the cholesterol levels, it elevates the HDL.

The most important single factor is the high density lipoprotein cholesterol. Niacin brings it up, and that’s what cleans out the vessels.

Vitamin C makes the vessel stronger, but niacin also clears it. Studies done in Seattle show that if you have blocked vessels. They start to clear within 18 months after you start taking niacin.

They Open up… And I think that if ever person, before they went for a coronary bypass, if they where to start on the right Orthomolecular program, they might not have to go.

In most cases…

– Doesn’t cholesterol repair the arteries? Isn’t it dangerous to drop it too quickly?

We don’t drop it, we just drop the bad one. The good one goes up.

– So it can still repair the arteries?

It does, yeah, the HDL, which is the good one, which is the only important one goes up. And so that’s very beneficial.”

Mayo Clinic Confirmed Niacin Fixed Cholesterol in Their “Untreatable” Patients

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“I went there for 3 days to give them a series of lectures. That’s my connection with them.
33:34:20
And that’s when I told them about the use of niacin for lowering cholesterol levels.

And that was published by a resident at that time. Called Dr Parson, William Parson, Bill Parson. He was a senior resident. He was told about what I had been doing. And they had on their wards a number of, 10 or 12 patients with high blood cholesterol that they couldn’t treat.

And when he heard about our work in Saskatchewan which we had published a year or 2 before. He became very excited and he asked his chief, could he do the same with these 10 patients. And he said yeah, and within 2 weeks they had confirmed all our claims.

Now once they published. Once it came out as a Mayo clinic publication, it became world wide news.

When we published it in the archives of biochemistry and biophysics it wasn’t news because it’s a very obscure magazine.

From a very obscure university, from the university of Saskatchewan.”

Cancer

2 Cases Ovarian Cancer, U. Kansas Med School teaches Vitamin C & Chemo, Dr Riordan MD

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“At the university of Kansas Medical School,

Dr Drisko, D – R – I – S – K – O, Dr Drisko, who worked with Dr. Riordan, They published a paper on two cases of ovarian cancer. Who where both well after 30 months. And their treatment was, chemotherapy, plus vitamin C, using Dr Riordan’s protocol.

And they’re both normal. And in the University of Kansas Medical School. Now when they teach their medical students, they teach them that the essential treatment for ovarian cancer is chemotherapy, plus vitamin C,

And if they ask a medical student what’s the correct treatment and he doesn’t mention vitamin C, he fails.

That’s the university of Kansas Medical School, the first University to start doing that.

– Repeat the exam?

At the University of Kansas Medical School, Dr. Riordan told me this, if they have the exam question, what is the correct treatment for ovarian cancer. If the student doesn’t mention vitamin C, he fails.

– in conjunction?

Yeah, yeah, I’m not talking in terms of avoiding chemotherapy. Because I’ve had no experience with that. I’ve seen over 1300 patients with cancer and only 1 or 2 refused to take any standard treatment. So my experience has always been a combination of the best of modern oncology, plus the best of what I thought was orthomolecular therapy.”

Mayo Clinic VS Pauling Cancer Trials

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
– Mayo clinic claimed vitamin C can kill you quicker with cancer.

Well that was, that was the study, mortel, not mortel, I forget the guys name,

After Cameron & Pauling had published their book. Which is a very interesting, a very good book. The Mayo Clinic told Pauling that they would repeat his work. They where going to actually reproduce what he and Cameron had done in Scotland.

Now in Scotland they had started with IV vitamin C and then had gone over to the oral form. They started always with the IV. And they reported certain therapeutic results. The Mayo clinic selected a group of patients who don’t ever respond to anything.

They don’t even respond to chemotherapy. But they gave them chemotherapy because they said what else can we do?

These where a group of very sick people that didn’t respond to anything.

And then when they published their data, and Linus Pauling read it. It turned out that they hadn’t made any serious attempt to repeat his work. They did it differently. So Pauling said,

What you did may be interesting, may be valuable, but it’s not my work.

You didn’t repeat what we did, therefore you cannot judge what we did on the basis of what you have done.

That’s all he said. And that started a major controversy.

And there was really a red hot controversy for a long time. I think the Mayo Clinic study has now been mostly discounted by any scientist who thinks about it. Although it is still gospel to the medical profession.

– Study lasted 2 years, but they only gave the patients vitamin C for 2 months?

That’s right, the Pauling studies, they kept the vitamin C on till they died. The Mayo studies they only ran them for a limited period of time because as soon as they decided they weren’t improving, they stopped the vitamin C.”

Cancer, 1st Case Study, Lung, 1 Month to Live

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“-As a psychiatrist how did you become involved in treating cancer?

Well, that happened by accident. In 1960,

we where then,we where working with the mauve factor of this particular anti-, this particular marker of oxidative stress. The mauve factor, which we found in a majority of patients.

And we wanted to find out how often it appeared in people who where physically stressed. And so we found that it was also present in a high proportion of Cancer cases. I was working at the University hospital in Saskatoon, so I had access to all the wards of the hospital.

In 1960, there was a an old gentleman who was a very famous professor, researcher, he had developed cancer of the lung. They diagnosed him, they treated him with Cobalt bomb radiation. He became psychotic. And therefore he was admitted to our ward at the University hospital because he had both cancer and was psychotic, I became very interested and we got a sample of his urine and he had a huge quantity of this particular mold factor. So I arranged that he would be started on niacin because of my experience had been that if you had that factor, you responded very well to niacin and vitamin C. So I started him on niacin and vitamin C on a friday and monday morning he was mentally normal.

Now, I wasn’t treating his cancer, I was treating his psychiatric condition, and so on monday morning when he was normal, I spoke to him and I said, look I said, I would give you, I was the only doctor in Canada in 1960 who had 500mg tablets of niacin and vitamin C.

They where made specially to order for us. The larges ones you could buy in a drugstore where a 100 mg. And they where too full of junk. Filler, so that they would make people sick if you took too many. So I said if you come to my office once a month.

I’ll give you free, these two vitamins, so he said ok, great. I didn’t think he would last long, after all he was terminal. The cancer clinic had said he was gonna be dead within a month.

Anyway, he kept coming and coming, and after a year he was still coming. And so I had lunch with the head of the cancer clinic, who was a friend of mine, and I said, what’s wrong with this guy, how come he’s still alive? He said well we’ve taken an X-ray of his lung every 3 months he said, the tumor is all gone.

He lived 28 months all together, and he was old. He was about 76, 77 when he died. I don’t know what he died of, cause I had hoped that he would die at our hospital and then we would do an autopsy. But he died at a different hospital and they buried him before I even knew he was dead. Because I would have loved to see his lung, to see what had happened to that tumour.

So that started me thinking, one case doesn’t prove anything. But one case is like looking at one white crow. How many white crows have you seen?

– White?

Crow, crows, a bird?
– None

But if you saw one. So the rule is, that crows are all black. Is that right?

But if you saw one white crow you’d say the rule is wrong. I’ve just seen a white crow. I had just seen a guy who was terminal, with lung cancer who had recovered on vitamins.

So this was like looking at the white crow in a population of black crows. So that always stayed in my mind. I thought it was the niacin. Not the vitamin C.

And then Pauling and Cameron published, and I read his work very carefully and I said oh my god it must have been the vitamin C, not the niacin. Then I moved here.”

Cancer, 2nd Case Study, Pancreas, 6 Months to Live

Dr Abram Hoffer MD Cancer, 2nd Case Study, Pancreas, 6 Months to Live

TRANSCRIPT:
“And in 1977, a woman with this, cancer of the head of the pancreas came to see me.She had had, she had turned jaundiced, they did the bypass operation. They didn’t do a biopsy because they where afraid they would spread the tumour.

And they finished up and they said to her, you will be dead within 6 months, get ready for it.

So she was a tough lady and she said to herself, the hell with that. I’m not gonna die.

And she read Normand (Kusin?)’s book, Normand (Kusin?) was a friend of mine who wrote this book on indications about laughing and vitamin C. I forget the name of the book.

So she began to take vitamin C on her own, and when her doctor, a GP, a very good GP discovered she was taking vitamin C. He said go and see Dr. Hoffer he knows something about vitamins.

So she came here, and she was then taking a small amount of vitamin C, so I told her to take a lot more. I took her up to Bob Cathcart level.

The sub-laxative level. She was able to take 40 grams a day, without any trouble. 3 months later, she phoned me up and she said. Dr Hoffer, she said, the tumour’s all gone.

They had done a CT scan, a cat scan, they couldn’t find the tumor. So they did the cat scan all over again. They thought that something had gone wrong with the machine. They couldn’t find the tumour. She lived 20 years.

So that was my 2nd case, now again, that’s a very striking case. She changed my life.

Because she worked in a bookstore, she began to tell everyone who would listen, about this amazing recovery she had experienced. So people began to clamour to come and see me.

So this is what’s been happening. So since 1977 I’ve seen around 1300 patients. Now I don’t treat their cancer. I don’t diagnose them. The treatment is all done by their own doctors.

by their own oncologists, but I advise them on the vitamins and nutrition they should follow. ”

Cancer, 3rd Case Study, Sarcoma of the Hip, Triathlete facing amputation

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“And the last case I want to tell you about is a very exciting one because he was a tri-athlete. He was a Canadian tri-athlete who was teaching in Japan.
49:06:09
And he developed a pain in his hip. Came back here and he was found to have a huge sarcoma, of the hip bone. Sarcoma of the hip, that’s a very deadly tumor. And so he went to see a top surgeon and he said we have to do an operation immediately. And what they would do is a hemi-pelvectomy. They take out half the pelvis.

That means you lose a leg. Lose probably the use of his bowels and bladder. He’d be a very sick guy after that. He said no, I’m not going to do that. So he flew to Toronto to get a second opinion.

And he spoke to the top surgeon in Canada. He said exactly the same thing. He said no, I don’t want that. He came back here. And came to see me at that time. So I started him on some vitamins, the typical approach that I follow, which is lots of vitamin C, plus some of the other vitamins.

plus diet. He also took himself, he also started himself on some herbs. Within 3 months the pain was all gone. This is now 4 or 5 years ago. He went back to Japan, full time work as a tri-athlete. He’s just back in Canada now for the first time and he’s very active in Canada’s health movement.

The tumour, is not gone. It’s down to half it’s original size but he’s totally pain free. And he can do, he can do anything. The tumour has been gradually and gradually receding. Over the years.

Sarcoma, and that’s the kind of stuff I see.”

Study of his Cancer Patients at Linus Pauling’s Request

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Yeah, I didn’t , I couldn’t do a controlled experiment. As I told you I’m familiar with double blind controlled experiments, but I couldn’t do it. You can’t do it in private practice.
52:03:14
And so out of the first 45 I had a number of patients that didn’t stick to the program. So I said well I’ll use them as a kind of pseudo-control. And I found that there’s an amazing difference.

And that’s , and then I gave this information to Linus Pauling. I was with him at a meeting in uh, Massachusetts, this was a (???) put on by Arthur Sacker, Arthur Sacker? Was a very famous American philanthropist, M.D., Psychiatrist, who was a friend of mine.

And Linus Pauling was at this (???) and I was there too. And so we had a chance to visit and talk, and I so I told him about what I was seeing and so he became very excited, because he had been under a fantastic attack from the whole profession. They even accused him of making people sick by giving them vitamin C.

So Linus Pauling was delighted to hear what I said, and he said to me are you going to publish and I said no, and he said why not. And I said because I don’t think I can find a publisher who will take it. He said go ahead and do it and I’ll make sure you get a publisher.

So I didn’t take him seriously. I thought he was you know, just being nice to me.

So for two years I didn’t do anything, and then one day 2 years later. I got a letter from Pauling. He says, Dear Abram, he says, where’s that data? So then I said, oh my god, he’s serious.

By this time I had treated 120, no, a 130 cases. So I got to work, and I did a follow up, I had to retrace every patient I had ever seen. And I never worked so hard over the next year, gathering that data. When I had all the 130 cases collected, I sent the data on to Linus Pauling. And then he worked out the statistical analysis of that particular study.

And it turned out that out of that group, the ones that did follow the program for at least 2 months had a much better prognosis compared to the ones who didn’t.”

Alcoholism and Drug Addiction

Niacin and Alcoholism, Cofounder of AA Took Niacin For The Rest of his Life

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
Success with Niacin in treatment of alcoholism?

Yes I have, it goes long back, Bill W. Who was the cofounder of AA was a good friend of mine.

I first met him in 1960. And at that time we had just started our studies with niacin and schizophrenia. Now it turns out that about 10% of alcoholics also have schizophrenia.
And so we would have patients who would have both diagnoses. And I found that giving them niacin, not only helped their schizophrenia but also helped their alcoholism. This became a standard observation.

And so I let Bill W. , Bill Wilson know about this and he became very interested. Now Bill W. himself although he had not been drinking for many years, suffered from chronic anxiety, tension and fatigue. Terrible.

From the moment he stopped drinking he never felt well. But he didn’t drink. So one day when I was visiting him in New York with my friend Humphrey Osmond, we started him, gave him, told him about niacin, started him on niacin, 1g taken 3 times per day after meals and within 2 weeks he was normal.

He was completely normal after 2 weeks of niacin. Well of course he became very excited about this. And after a while, after many years of working with it he became so convinced that this was an additional answer to AA, you know the AA program is psycho-social, he thought that niacin was one of the answers to many of these members of AA who suffered from chronic depression and tension, which is very common.

And so he began to publish, he published, what he called a letter to doctors of AA, there’s so many doctors alcoholic they have their own medical association.

And they have annual meetings. So he began to distribute the information that he had gained on his own studies, to the doctors in AA and they became very interested. And that heped spread the, using niacin. My feeling is, that members of AA who are sober, but who suffer extreme discomfort, that one of the best things they can take is niacin.

And I’m well known for that, I get a large number of members of AA who come here just for that reason.
– Did Bill W continue niacin after becoming normal after 2 weeks?

Yeah, he took it for the rest of his life.”

Drug Addicts Recover on Vitamin C & Niacin, No Withdrawal Symptoms

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Yes it has, there was, in fact, Irwin Stone, who published a book on vitamin C. he did a study with a chiropractor in California, and they published a series of papers on the treatment of addiction, and withdrawal of addiction.

And they found that they could take heroin addicts, this was published in our journal, we published this many years ago.

They could take heroin addicts and put them on huge doses of niacin and huge doses of vitamin C, in fact they went very large, up to 10, 20, 30g a day of each. And they could take a heroin addict and put them on these two vitamins plus say, a high amino acid mixture, and they would come off the heroin without any withdrawal, It’d be smooth, they’d come right off without any withdrawal. And then after a week of this heavy dose of vitamin

treatment, they would then decrease the amounts of vitamins, and after that maintain them on smaller doses.

I think it’s very valuable for that.

But it’s not generally used that way because if you, because the people working in this field, don’t know about vitamins. ”

Alcohol & Drug Addiction, 80% Success Rate AA + Vitamins

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“There are clinics in the States, (Joel Larson? ) has a clinic near Chicago where she treats alcoholics and other addicts, using the combination of AA, that’s Alcoholics Anonymous, plus the use of vitamins. And she is finding 80% succes rate, 80% of her patients after treatment do not go back to their addicting compound. It’s amazing.

– Why did they attack Oscar? (TRANSCRIPTION MISSING)

Well, they do that all the time, that’s nothing unique. Give me an instance where they would revoke the sale of something that does work, except drugs. The FDA works very closely with the drug industry.

and , and they have their regulations. And the regulations are that you can’t advertise anything until you have spent millions and millions of dollars proving to them that it’s safe and they go to ridiculous extremes. I’ll give you an example.

David (Horobin?), a very famous scientist, friend of mine, working in the field of schizophrenia with the essential fatty acids. He discovered, he developed a skin test. A skin patch test for diagnosing schizophrenia, and what you do is you put a plastic strip on your skin containing different concentrations of niacin.

And when you have schizophrenia the area under that pocket, doesn’t turn red. If you’re normal it turns red. There’s a flush, now that means applying a tiny amount of niacin to the skin for 5 minutes. The FDA had not allowed him to release it yet because they claimed it hasn’t been proven to be safe.

And here they are, they are allowing VIOX, which probably killed 60,000 people worldwide

They are allowing that to come back on the market with just a warning label, a black label.

So there is something totally wrong with the way the, with the basic philosophy of the FDA, and in fact some of their leaders have even said, they have said that their job was to promote the sales of the drug companies.

Their job should have been to protect the safety of the public.

But that’s not what they do.”

Schizophrenia

Case Studies

1st Case Study (Dying Catatonic Schizophrenic Saved)

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“And so we began our pilot studies. And I’ll tell you the first case ’cause it’s very interesting, in 1952, I had just received my first supplies of niacin and vitamin C,

and I was then working in Regina Saskatchewan which is north of where Dr. Osmond was working in a mental hospital. So I took a supply of these two vitamins to Dr. Osmond and while I was talking to him in his office,

the chief psychiatrist for the hospital came in and told us that kenneth, a young man called Kenneth was dying.
Kenneth was a catatonic schizophrenic, he in fact was dying.
And he said we have to notify the family so they get here in time.

So I said to Humphrey Osmond, well if he’s dying already we’ve got nothing to lose,
let’s go down and give him some vitamins. So we went rushing down to the ward

and there was Kenneth lying on his bed, mouth open, breathing heavily,
completely unconscious, totally out of it, he was in fact dying.

He couldn’t swallow anything so we put a tube into his mouth and we poured in, a huge amount of niacin and a huge amount of vitamin C, I think we put in 10g of niacin and about 5g of vit C.

Now the first question was would he survive?
Were we going to kill him?

‘Cause this was the largest single dose that had ever been recorded.

Now we knew from our reasoning that we had to give a large dose.

He didn’t die, so the first step he didn’t die. The second day, he sat up and drank it.
30 days later Kenneth was normal. His family came in and they said to dr Osmond,
why are you keeping Kenneth here?

And dr Osmond said we’re not sure how long he’s going to stay well, and they said we don’t care about that, we want him home!
They took him home.

Now that was the first case we treated in Saskatchewan. And its always good to have the first case positive because it gives you added incentive to continue with our studies.

I did a recheck on Kenneth 15 years later, I wanted to trace it back to see what had happened to him.
And I had by that time I was in charge of a large research division in Saskatchewan, so we did a follow up on him and we found Kenneth,

He came in to see me. He was now a very, he was a businessman, he was president of their board of trade,
he couldn’t remember ever having been in waver?? (the hospital) but he was still normal.

Now that was very exciting. So that was our first study. ”

Definition of Curing Schizophrenia, 17 Psychotics Became MDs

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Well let’s talk about the treatment then, after all the most important things are the results, the theory is interesting but not important. The important thing is how many patients get well.

– Right!

And here’s my definition of being well. Their free of signs and symptoms, they’re getting on well with their family, they’re getting on well with their community, and they’re paying income tax. That’s extremely important, they’re paying income tax, in other words they’re working. They are gainfully employed.

Now if you put the same patients on tranquilizers, they hardly ever thereafter pay income tax. they never get well enough to work.

If I were flying on an Air Canada flight and I knew the pilot was taking chlorepromazine?? or taking any tranquilizer I wouldn’t fly.

But if I knew he was taking vitamins I wouldn’t care because vitamins don’t, they don’t prevent you from functioning as a normal individual.

ok, so that’s my definition of getting well.

Now if you start out with, i’ll give you the details but I want to talk about 17 young men, who in their teens where psychotic.

They were treated by orthomolecular means all across north america, they all went back to college, they took medicine, and they became doctors.

One of them, he’s the son of a very prominent American writer, and he applied to Harvard Medical School, he wanted to take medicine at Harvard medical school.

They wanted him badly. Because to get into Harvard you have to have not only money, but you have to have money and intelligence, and you have to have a name.

It all helps. So he applied, he wrote to me before he applied, he said he wasn’t sure wether he should tell the admissions committee that he had had schizophrenia or not. But in the end he said he had to be honest and tell them what he had had.

Now the admissions committee didn’t want him because they didn’t want any schizophrenics, but they also wanted him because he had this famous name, so they said to him come back and we’ll tell you tomorrow what our decision is.

The next day he came back so they said to him, they said we know, that you never get well from schizophrenia , ok, but you are well, therefore you never had schizophrenia . They admitted him.

And he is now the head of a large pediatric clinic, doing well.

Another patient of mine, he went very psychotic and he was part of our double blind control experiment, he went through the placebo arm, didn’t respond, so we put him on vitamins and he had electroshock treatment as well, he made a complete recovery.

He took medicine, became a psychiatrist. and eventually became the president of a large psychiatric association. President!

A third one, today, he is today head of a department of psychiatry at a major american university but they don’t know his history and he wont tell them of course. And the last one was a young man that I saw 4 years ago, who came down from Alaska to see me, and I heard from him 6 months ago, he’s just been accepted for 1st year medicine.

Now these are young bright intelligent, young, teenage boys, who after their psychoses went to university and became doctors. Now that would have never happened had they been placed upon tranquilizers. tranquilizers will not allow you, if that’s all that you use, to ever become normal.”

How Many of your Schizophrenic Patients Pay Income Tax? 18 Personal Accounts, 500 Published Papers

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Now I have compiled a list, I’ve published a lot of papers, I’ve published over 5-600 papers, and so recently, we are now publishing from the international schizophrenia foundation, of which i’m president,

we are now publishing a series of 18 personal accounts, these are my patients, not mine, sorry, many they where mine, but many I had never seen, these where patients who had been sick, who had not responded to treatment, who had placed themselves or I had placed them on the vitamin program, who are now well.

An example was an american business man who wrote to me 3 years ago, he said doctor Hoffer, he said, I understand you’re in some trouble? I didn’t know what he meant but, he said I’m one of your recovered patients, and then he said, he said, 25 years ago I was very psychotic, terribly psychotic, he said, my father got hold of your book, how to live with schizophrenia , he asked me to read it, but I wouldn’t read it, but eventually I became so sick, in desperation I read your book, and I began to take the vitamins, he said I’ve been well ever since. He now is the head of a large company in the states.

So these are personal accounts of 18 young men and women, and many of them are americans who came out here for help, who had failed to respond to any other treatment, who are now well, remember what I said, their well, they’re paying income tax, working, fully employed, they’re well.

This does not happen,

and if you run across any psychiatrists who poo poo the mega vitamin approach, the orthomolecular approach, ask him bluntly, how many of your schizophrenic patients pay income tax? see what kind of reaction you get.”

Schizophrenia Case Study, 60g a Day

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“- As a general guideline, for people who can’t get help. A gram w each meal?

They usually, they often will start with too little, they’re afraid. They’re afraid of using the right amount.So, that can be a problem. Yeah.

But on the other hand theres, some strange things happen, hrum,

Many years ago I got a letter from a woman from Denver Colorado, and she said, Dear Dr. Hoffer, thank you for helping my daughter get well.

I’d never seen her. So then in this letter she said, my daughter was 16, and she was schizophrenic and she was told by her psychiatrist that her mother had made her psychotic. This was another old idea.That used to be very common. The Schizophrenogenic mother

So the girl said to herself if mom made me sick, I’m out of here. So she went and joined a hippy crowd and she ran with this hippy crowd.

And one day at a local drugstore she ran across a paperback book called, megavitamin therapy written by a New York reporter, who wrote about our work.

And there she read about niacin and schizophrenia. So suddenly she did, oh my God! Maybe if I take Niacin I might get better.

Now this is kind of funny because when she, (loud noise) oh sorry, When she told her friend that she was going to take niacin, they cautionned her not to do it. They said don’t take that, it’s dangerous.

Now they where taking drugs, and pot and everything else, you know, but they wouldn’t want to take niacin. Anyway so she went home. Told her mom. And she went around and couldn’t find a single doctor that would monitor her. She saw 12 different doctors, not one would help her. So on her own, she began to take niacin. And she had read, which is correct, that if you take too much niacin, you get nauseated.

So she now started taking more and more and more and more. She never got nauseated. Before long, she was taking 120 pills a day of niacin.

60 grams a day of niacin. And when she reached that level all the voices stopped. So I thought that was a great story.

Anyway I was giving a public lecture in Denver, a few years later, so I thought here, this is an appropriate story. I’ll tell them the same story.

So I tell them the story in Denver and at the end of my story a woman at the back says, Dr Hoffer!, she says. Would you like to meet her?

She was at the meeting.

– Wow!

So she and her daughter came up to me in the front and I had a chat with them. And she now was taking just 3g a day which is a normal dose. She was well.

She had taken 120 tablets, 60 grams of niacin a day, most people couldn’t tolerate that. She could, and it got her normal.

– And then after her need decreased

That’s right, after she was well, she didn’t have to take nearly as much.

So I, I hear these stories all the time.

Now, if I where not allowed to use niacin as a part of my treatment for schizophrenia, I’d dump medicine. I’d get out

I’d say the hell with it. Cause I’m not gonna treat patients with drugs just to keep them sick forever. ”

Many Violent Criminals Are Actually Schizophrenic – 8 Case Studies

Dr Abram Hoffer MD Many Violent Criminals Are Actually Schizophrenic – 8 Case Studies

TRANSCRIPT:
“I’m very concerned about that because many people who commit criminal acts, are really schizophrenic. Now you don’t dare say that aloud because the schizophrenic societies are afraid of that.

Now what they do say is that the incidence of criminal behavior amongst schizophrenic patients is not any greater than it is amongst the general population. That’s true.

If you look at 100 normal people and maybe 1 or 2 are criminals. If you look at 100 schizophrenics maybe 1 or 2 are criminals.

The big difference is when a schizophrenic commits a crime it’s bizarre. There’s no sense to it.

There’s one of these cases where a student, who was a nice quiet student, never creates any problems, one day gets a gun and shoots 20 of his fellow students.

These are schizophrenics. You have to get inside their mind to understand why they did that.

And modern psychiatry doesn’t do that they don’t get inside the mind of the patient.

In 1850 John Connely, who I mentioned earlier, brilliant English psychiatrist, wrote a book called “Indications of Insanity”, and he defined it, insanity, as a disease of perception, combined with the inability to tell that these changes where real or not.

I’ll give you an example.

He describes a woman who was depressed in his hospital 1850. She was in her room and she was depressed because she knew her husband was dead. Well, he wasn’t dead, but she knew he was dead. And she knew because, she could see his ghost sitting on a tree outside her window. The ghost was a hallucination.She saw the ghost, she concluded it was her husband’s ghost therefore he must be dead. So she’s depressed.

Ok, so the psychiatrist in charge, tells her husband that. And so he says, he’s a common sense kind of a guy, he says, well let me go in and see her. Then she’ll see I’m not dead. So the psychiatrist said, no you can’t do that, that would shock her too much. So when no one was looking he snuck into the bedroom anyway. She looked at him, fainted. Got up, and said John, let’s go home.

Why? Because she still saw the hallucination, but she now knew it didn’t mean her husband was dead. Therefore there’s no need to be depressed anymore.

Now I had a patient, a schizophrenic woman. Who was hearing voices. God was talking to her. And God said. Burn down your neighbors house.

Now when God talks, you listen to him, don’t you? She did! She set fire to her neighbor’s house. And she wound up in hospital. I treated her. She recovered. She now runs her own business. She supervises 35 women. She has her own business she operates. She’s been well ever since.

If you’re gonna deal with schiz, if you’re gonna deal with strange behavior, you’ve got inside the brain of these patients and find out why did they do it. Why did you do it? They’ll tell you. Every time they’ll tell you.

This kid that shot everyone, maybe he thought there was a major plot against him. Everyone at school was after him. That they where all gonna do something to him. Maybe he killed them in self-defense… As he saw it.

And yet, we do these terrible crimes. You heard about those 4 Mounties being killed in Canada? In Edmonton. Just west of Edmonton, 4 of our RCMP officers where killed by one guy who was the terror of the community. He was well known as a terrible person. Had been in jail, had at least 15 convictions against him but still nothing was done. The police went to recover some property that he had stolen.

He killed 4 of them, and then killed himself. Now why was he allowed to behave that way?

Because no one really diagnosed him properly. Had they diagnosed him properly as schizophrenic. Found out why he behaved the way he did. They could have incarcerated him. They could have treated him. They could have got him re-well.

I’ll give you an example of a, a patient of mine who was, he was,

Many years ago in 19…60 I think, he was an American student getting his Ph.D. at the University of Saskatchewan in Physics. And one day, he took a rifle. Drove out to the edge of Saskatoon onto one of the fields, and began to shoot at the cars that where driving by.

And so he was arrested by the R, he didn’t kill anyone. He was arrested by the RCMP. And his lawyer thought, there’s something bizarre about this guy. So he sent him to see me.

And he came to talk to me, and he was bland. No emotion at all, he would just talk, and told me what happened. He told me about the things he had done. He says one day he was, in Washington D.C. in the library, at the National library. He hid, and when all the staff left and all the doors where closed. He pushed all the stacks over.

Thought that was great fun. Turned out this young man was schizophrenic.

So I told the lawyer. I said, this guy is schizophrenic and I think we’d have to plead insanity, hold up don’t take any action.

Don’t do anything, let me see if I can get him well. So he began to come and see me every 2 weeks for treatment. I started him on niacin immediately. I saw him every 2 weeks for 3 months.And one day… after 3 months of visits, he came to me and he was full of anxiety, he was, he was just sweating, it was just pouring out, and I said what’s wrong?

And he said, I just realized I wanted to kill someone.

He had just regained insight. So I continued to work with him and then I advised the, his lawyer that there’s really no point in prosecuting him. He was an American and we didn’t want to get involved, so they said, so they said, they where very kind. They said ok, they gave him a condition, they said, if you finish your Ph.D. and get out of Canada as soon as you can, we won’t prosecute.

He went back to the states on vitamins, and later on, I heard he’d become a professor in Physics. for one of the American Universities.

That’s what I mean, you have to find out why these people do what they do.

– I read 2 other similar cases, devil told him to drive for 60 minutes and kill whoever he came across.

That’s the famous Hoffman case, Yeah, that was terrible. He killed 6 or 7 members of the family. The only one he didn’t kill was the baby. There was a baby crawling on the floor, he didn’t kill the baby.

I asked him, why didn’t you kill the baby? He said because by that time, I was tired of killing. Terrible story.

And he had been in a mental hospital! He had told the psychiatrist in charge, he said the devil tells me to do these things. They laughed at him… Had they treated him properly, he wouldn’t have done that. He’s still sitting today in a mental hospital in Ontario.

In one of our chronic mental hospitals in Ontario, he’ll die there. He destroyed the whole family, he destroyed himself. So it’s a very serious situation.

– in contrast, a patient shot a pillow between his two parents

That’s right. He was a young boy, and one night he took a rifle and shot at his parents, he told me after, he didn’t want to hit ‘em, he shot in between them, But after he had done what he had did, he ran from the house in his bare feet, it was 40 below outside, he froze his feet. The RCMP found him right away, took him into the jail and when he came to trial I was for the defense, so I outlined what had happened.
And we suggested that if they would release him to me, under my care.

I would admit to my hospital where I was working in Saskatoon at the city hospital, that I would treat him. And luckily for the boy, the crown, the prosecutor didn’t appear. Now the reason was that the prosecutors where afraid to appear against me, because I usually won my cases.

And so he was told not to appear, anyways so the judge issued an order that this boy was to be released to my care, I promptly admitted him to the hospital, put him on treatment. He made a complete recovery.
He then got a job up north in Saskatchewan, and I think he’s happily married, he’s been fine ever since.

Now here are 2 cases where some harm could have come to certain people if the right action had not been taken.

If the man that had shot president Reagan, had been treated with vitamins, when the first psychiatrist saw him, he never would have shot the president.

– Next prime minister of Sweden, a woman,

Yeah, I remember that,

– Anna Lynn.

Yeah that was a big case, that was a very famous case. They caught him didn’t they?

– Yeah, I have the article right here from the BBC, they say the self-confessed killer of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lynn, told a Stockholm court that voices in his head made him attack the politician.

Well, I believe that, they should have, and they have to take that seriously.

– He didn’t know who she was?

He’s following orders

– Yeah!

In his head!
yeah! (sadly)”

Supplements VS Conventional Drug Treatments

Suicide, Weight Gain & Other Dangerous Side Effects From Antipsychotics

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“You mentioned tranquilizers over the long term do cause brain damage?

They can. they can, it depends which ones your using. The old drugs like Haldol In my opinion do not cause brain damage. I’m not talking about things like Haldol and Chlorpromazine.

The ones that I’m worried about are the new anti-psychotics like (drespiranol)? and Olanzapine, Zyprexa. These are the ones i’m concerned about.

They can cause brain damage, but worse than that they do have major side effects, they cause obesity, increased diabetes, increased triglycerides, increased cholesterol levels, they cause these terrible metabolic changes in patients, many of our patients become fat and sick, totally unable to work.

I had a young woman came to me when she was 19, she was being well controlled with Haldol by her psychiatrist in Vancouver, he wanted to test a new drug out so he put her on one of the new anti-psychotics and within 6 months she gained 80 pounds.

Her life was destroyed, this young girl of 19 now looked like a sack of flour. She pleaded with him, please I don’t want to take this, I want to go back to the Haldol??, and he wouldn’t do it. Now this young girls life has been destroyed by the tranquilizer. She’s never going to get better.

– Case of a young man who was going to start your treatment, but then his Dr. talked him out of it and he hung himself.

I won’t talk about anyone in particular but there’s several. They didn’t hang themselves, they committed suicide the more usual way, men don’t hang themselves very often

In Canada. They use guns and they use knives and things, anyway I’ve had several, not just one, I’ve had several patients who I had on my treatment program who were recovering, but as with any disease now and then you relapse, they might have stopped taking their medication. They might have got the flu, there’s all sorts of explanations for why they might have a relapse, and the usual thing is that you go back into a hospital and you deal with what is wrong and you keep them on the same program, and these young men where doing pretty well on my program bu they went through a minor relapse,

they went to the psychiatric ward, but they wouldn’t let them take their vitamins at the hospital. And when they where discharged, the patients didn’t come back to see me, and a few months after that committed suicide. I’ve never yet had a single schizophrenic patient on orthomolecular treatment, commit suicide. It never happens. So it’s very frustrating to have these things happening all the time.”

Schizophrenics Take Vitamins, No Harsh Side Effects, Clozapine Case Study

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“-they don’t trust anyone anymore, they don’t want to take products,

I know!

-do you find that?

I don’t have that problem. My patients, the reason they don’t take drugs, they don’t like the side effects.

But there are no side effects to vitamins, I mean, they’re minor. And so patients will take the vitamins but they won’t take the drugs.

And my patients, I explain to them what I’m trying to do, I explain what they have and how we’re gonna work together, and they trust me.

So my patients have a pretty good track record of going along with the treatment.

-And they’re lucid enough to comprehend ?

At first not but later on they become that way.

– So how do you get them to start the program at the beginning?

Well if they’re really psychotic, to that degree, they do have to have medication to control their psychoses but they usually come along with their relative. If it’s a son, they come with their mother.

I’ll give you another example, there was a young man from New York City, came here with his mother, he’d been sick for 2 years, he’d been in New York State hospital system for, 3 different times. He and his mom arrived here about 4 years ago.

And he stat there and she sat there, and he was there in body but his soul wasn’t there, he, his mind was blank. It was empty. He was on a huge dose of a very strong drug called clozapine.

And so I got all the information from his mother. Nothing from him. He couldn’t tell me anything. But she was a very good woman and she looked after him. They told her in New York, that he would never get well. He’d never finish University. He’d never get off medication.

Well after, right now, 911, you remember what happened in New York 911, which was a year after I first saw him. He was so much better, that he was a volunteer, helping to direct traffic in New York city.

Right now, he’s finished University, he’s got a girlfriend, we still haven’t got him off the medication, ‘cause it’s very tough to get him off these modern drugs. They’re terribly addictive.

But we have his clozapine down from 600 to 200, and the big problem now is to get him down to 0, and that’s been really hard.

So it depends on the patient, but the main thing is that if you start treating a schizophrenic patients, you can’t give up.

You have to work with them until they get well.”

Vitamins Outperform Schizophrenia Treatment (Which Hasn’t Improved in 55 years)

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“I’ve been involved in the treatment of schizophrenia since 1950, when I first was retained by the saskatchewan government to become director of psychiatric research for the department of public health in saskatchewan. In 1950, if you were admitted to a mental hospital for schizophrenia that was a life sentence, you never got out, and the hospitals were absolutely terrible,

coming through ok?
yeah, fine, just fine

and so, in starting our research, this was the main problem. We had in our hospitals over 5000 chronic patients, over half of them were chronic schizophrenic patients and they weren’t doing very well, we had no treatment at all.
They had ECT which helped some of them but not for very long. We had insulin coma, which was dangerous and helped a few,
so in about 1951 in the fall, dr. Humphrey Osbourne came from England and he brought with him an idea that he and his friend had developed while they were there in England, which was that it was possible in the schizophrenic body there might be a compound that was the cause of their hallucinations,

in other words it was an idea that there might be something present with the properties of mescaline but somehow connected to adrenaline.

It’s a long story which I wont go into, so then we developped the adrenochrome hypotheses, in other words we developed the idea that there was an abnormal conversion of adrenaline to adrenochrome and this was the begining of our research. We felt that this might be the way of getting at this terrible problem.

Now looking back over the years, it’s now 55 years since I first got involved with the treatment of schizophrenia, there’s has been a major difference but the results of treatments are not any better, and that’s the irony of it that despite of all the modern advances in psychiatry and in medicine the results of today’s treatments are really no better.

The only difference is that in those days they were all incarcerated in old inadequate mental health hospitals buildings and now most of them are kicked out on the streets and they are homeless. Half the homeless people in Victoria are in fact chronic schizophrenia patients who have been discharged from the hospital on the modern anti psychotic medication which is helpful, but it doesn’t cure anyone.

And to give you some historical perspective, in 1850, in England, there was a dr. named John Connely who developed a treatment for what they call the insane, and they also had at that time
the Quakers, you’ve heard of the Quakers, they had the moral treatment of the insane. What we would call today’s schizophrenics and they found that if they treated these
patients, the insane people, they put them into special houses that no more than 12 people, they had no doctors, no nurses, they were treated by the members of the Quacker faith, and they got half of them well. Half of them recovered in 1850. And what did they do? They gave them shelter, good food, and they treated them kindly, with attention and humanity, they gave them the absolute 3 essentials of any treatment.

Today with modern medicine, the recovery rate is less than 10%, this is hard to believe but with schizophrenic patient today, who gets treated with the modern drugs, that less than 10% will ever be fully gainfully employed thereafter, I think that’s a terrible shame.

So this is what’s been happening, the treatment for schizophrenia today is not adequate, except for the treatment that we helped develop called orthomolecular treatment.

But to come back to that, so when humphrey brought this idea, we developed the hypotheses that there was an increased oxidation from adrenaline to adrenochrome which is an hallucinogen, we then said what can we do to prevent this reaction from occurring in the body? We wanted a treatment, we didn’t really care about the hypotheses we wanted to help these patients get well, and so since I had my phd in biochemistry and vitamins, and I knew something about the vitamins, it occurred to us that we could use two vitamins that might protect the schizophrenic person from this change. And one of them is vitamin B3 which is known either as niacin or niacinamide and we figured out that this could be helpful because it might cut down on the conversion of noradrenaline to adrenaline which in turn would cut down on the conversion of adrenaline to adrenochrome

and if we also added some vitamin C because we knew then, this was in 1952, we were way ahead of the game, and we were then talking about antioxidants which only became popular in medicine in the past 10 years.

We knew that vitamin C was an anti-oxidant, so we felt that by putting in large amounts of vitamin c, we could decrease the oxidation of adrenaline to adrenochrome.
So these were the two vitamins that we were going to use.”

Self Treatment, Safety of Vitamins VS Danger of Drugs

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Ideally, ideally, you should never have to treat yourself, ideally, but we, we don’t live in an ideal world.

And my feeling is that, if you realize you have schizophrenia, and you read about the OM treatment,

And if you can’t find a doctor that’s willing to treat you… then you have to do it yourself.

And, you can’t do that with drugs, you can’t treat yourself with drugs, ‘cause they’re too dangerous.

But you can do that with vitamins because people don’t die from vitamins.

There hasn’t been a death from vitamins in the past 40 years.

Anywhere in the world!

But as you know in the United States alone, 110k people die each year, from the use of drugs prescribed properly in hospitals.

With vitamins you can play with them because their safe, so my recommendation is that they read the literature, read my books, other books as well,

Make the necessary changes in their diet, make the necessary changes in taking their vitamins. Try to get their GP or their doctor to cooperate with them, if they can’t, then go ahead on their own.

Now most patients don’t even ask me. They read, they read our books, so they go ahead on their own. They, they don’t need my permission to go ahead and start using vitamins.

And many people are getting well, and they’re just now, over the past 5 years, they’ve been getting to it, reveal themselves, and do let me know, this is what they’ve been doing.

Now overall, you can divide your schizophrenic patients who also have been sick for less than 2 years, and those that have been sick forever, almost from the time.

And then, with the 1st class of patients, and this is based upon my own experience on having treated over 5000 patients, since 1952,

If these patients will agree to accept the treatment for at least 2 years, 90% will be well.
90% of them will.

With the chronic group, the ones who’ve been sick a lot longer, I did a survey of my patients who had been sick, they had been sick at least 10 years. They had failed to respond to any modern treatment. And then they came under my control.

And I’ve had a large number, I’ve had about 500 schizophrenic patients that I’ve been seeing over the years,

Some of them I see once a year, sometimes once every 3, 4 years, some of them I don’t ever have to see them anymore, Some have become good friends of mine.

They’re happy, doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re getting aong really well.

So I looked at these chronic patients. I did a survey of some of them. I couldn’t examine them all.

So I surveyed about 30, and I found that of these 30, who had been sick that long, half of them are well.

Half, the other half where better, but they hadn’t recovered.

And I’ve had a few patients where it’s taken 20 years. I have a few patients where it took 20 years of treatment before they became normal.

20 years!

– How long before the chronics showed improvement?

Some of them will start to show within a year or 2. Some will start within 5 years. And these 20 year old ones, they didn’t show any improvement for at least 20 years.

– 20 years?
(nods)
yeah!”

Nutrients vs Drugs, Synthetic vs Natural Vitamin C

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Yeah, well allopathy, has been called xenobiotic medicine, it’s not just natural, because there are many natural compounds that are very poisonous. You eat certain plants and you’ll die.

There natural, nature has made them, the term natural doesn’t apply. It has to be compounded with which the body is familiar. And that includes, amino acids, sugars, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and enzymes. These are the things that are normaly present in the body. We have about 50k

chemicals in our body, so these are natural, and if you look at the whole vastity of the medicine, the only medication that are successful in ever treating anyone successfully are these natural things. They are hormones like insulin, thyroid, the cortico-steroids, they are used for treatment.

Vitamins, minerals, but synthetics, the things like VIOX, Celebrex, and all the anti-depressants and the anti-psychotics. They are not naturally present in the body. And therefore the body doesn’t like them. And therefore there is a major problem when you take them.

– Scope of side effects unknow in xeno…

Well I want to again define the word synthetic. I’m not against synthetic. I’m a chemist, I have a PhD in biochemistry, synthetic is ok.

Synthetic Vitamin C, is just as good as the natural vitamin C. In fact the only kind you can buy is synthetic, you cannot buy natural vitamin C. It would cost you too much. So wether the body makes it or we make it.

It’s ok, as long as it’s made pure. There is one disadvantage of synthetic because there may be trace amounts left of the chemicals which are used in making it. That’s one of the disadvantages. So instead of saying synthetic we’ll want to talk about compounds which our body can make, or which the body can tolerate.

And compounds which the body cannot make, or cannot tolerate. As a rule, a compound that the body cannot tolerate will kill you.
These are the poisons.

The compounds that are being used today therapeutically, have some similarity to natural compounds or else the body couldn’t even tolerate it.

but they’re dangerous and because they interfere in the natural processes that goes on in within the cells of the body.
And I have what I call, Hoffer’s rule, which is that no xenobiotic, no xenobiotic, no unnatural molecules, will ever be found to treat successfully any disease.

And that’s based upon Linus Pauling’s work. ”

Horizontal VS Vertical Medicine. Conventional Medicine is Great For Surgery, Terrible For Illness

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“I define horizontal medicine as when you are flat on your back, you’re in a major car accident and you’re in the emergency, flat on your back. Modern medicine is superb for that. They’ll save your life. They’ll do everything possible, and they do really good surgery, anaesthesia in medicine. I’m very proud of what doctors can do for horizontal medicine.

Vertical medicine, what we call the walking wounded, chronic arthritis, chronic (???), chronic migraines, chronic schizophrenia, these diseases, diabetes, these diseases by which we can still walk around,

modern medicine does not have the answer.

The answer is very strictly, nutritional or OM medicine.”

Counter Arguments

Not Scientifically Proven?

1st Double Blind Study in History of Psychiatry

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“After that we ran 7, 8 more patients of similar nature, these where where I worked at _______? way (hospitals name) Regina and also where Dr. Osmond worked in Waver,

and we found that of the 8 patients that we started out on Niacin, all 8 got well.
every 8 got well.

So now the question was what are we going to do about it?

Now we were still not 100% sure, because to think that you could cure such a dreadful disease like schizophrenia by giving them simple vitamins was in fact ridiculous.

No one knew what it was, no one knew what was causing it, how could we have the temerity to claim that we had a treatment for schizophrenia ?

So we decided first of all well we needed some money, so we applied to Ottawa, the federal government to get a grant, so that we could do further research, and they advised us to do it double blind.

Now I had taken my phd in biochemistry and I knew statistical analyses, so I knew what they were talking about. But they advised us what to do,

so we then started the first double blind controlled experiment in the history of psychiatry in 1952.

And we selected 30 acute, that’s early schizophrenic patients who’d been sick less than 2 years, who were admitted to a general hospital in Regina, and they were randomized, into 3 groups,

one was a placebo, the other one was on niacinamide and the third one was on niacin. Now the reason for that is that when you take niacin you turn red, You flush, And you can’t hide that.

You can’t blind niacin. Well we didn’t tell our clinical people what we were doing. We simply said we are testing niacin against placebo. And they would assume that every non-flushing patient was getting placebo, when in fact half of them we’re getting niacinamide.

Now that was a real hidden control. ok. So we ran that study for about 2 years and then we did a follow up, and, it was a blind follow up. We didn’t want our investigators to know what they had gotten in hospital.

Now we found at the end of the study that of the 10 patients on placebo, 3 were well, which was then considered a natural recovery rate for this type of patient.

And of the niacinamide group and the niacin group, 75% were well. In other words we had doubled the 2 year recovery rate by adding niacin or niacinamide to the treatment of that particular day.

So that was the beginning of the whole orthomolecular movement of that time.”

Why Published Double Blind Studies Have Been Ignored for 50 years

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“A I hear a lot of rethoric about people talking down on orthomolecular medicine saying that there isn’t double blind, randomized studies done, when we had this study done in you said 1952. So how come the psychiatric movement hasn’t picked up on this.

The simple answer is that they’re ignorant. If you don’t read the literature, that’s the conclusion your gonna come to. In fact we did 6 double blind studies between 1952 and 1960. And there was a double blind done by Dr whitenborne(?) in New Jersey, under a grant from the national institute of mental health.

He did a major double blind controlled study in New Jersey, long after we had done ours, and he confirmed everything we had said. So there have been a lot of double blinds, but if you ask any psychiatrist, they simply don’t even know about it.

Now one of the problems was that the medical journals won’t accept our papers.
There’s a blackout. They have tried to black out, they have tried to block out anything that has to do with orthomolecular medicine.

In fact right now, you’ve heard of Medline, Medline is the abstracting service by the United States Library of Congress that abstracts all the scientific journals all around the world.

They won’t cover our journal.
I’m the editor of the journal of orthomolecular medicine and they won’t cover our journal.
So we’re fighting with them over that now.

So if any one tells you that, simply tell them that “You’re ignorant, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

– And why would they resist this information? why do you think that they’re blacking it out?

Because they’re afraid of it. There’s no money.

The drug, the treatment for schizophrenia today is controlled by the drug companies, and they work with drugs that they can patent.

Do you understand that? That means that every 15 years they have to change their drugs because the patent runs out.

When the first tranquilizer came in in 1955, they were very effective.
In other words you see a rapid result. You take a psychotic patient and the next day he’s sleeping. You get a very dramatic response.

They don’t get well, but you can certainly knock’em down. Now these were publicized by the drug companies who made millions out of them in the first year that the tranquilizers came on the market,

They probably spent 50 Million dollars advertising them. No one has advertised vitamins because there’s no money in it. You can’t take a patent on vitamins.

– You mentioned the tranquilizers had long term detrimental effects?

They don’t allow you to get well. That’s right, now I use tranquilizers because in combination with our program they do work together pretty well.

In other words, you can use the tranquilizers for their rapid immediate response if you have to control your patient.

At the same time you start them on the orthomolecular treatment approach and as they get well you gradually withdraw the drug until eventually they are taking none or very small amounts.

We published our material, the books have been published, The book “How to Live With Schizophrenia” that I published with Dr. Osmond, I think first published in ’64, ’62 or ’64,
over the years have sold over a 100K copies,

so the public knows a lot more about this than the profession does. I keep hearing from patients all the time who write me, and tell me that they’ve treated themselves.

I just got a letter the other day from a man who was worried about his fiancee who was becoming psychotic. In his letter to me he says,
“my mother was schizophrenic 25 years ago he says, she read your book, she went on to your vitamins, she’s been well ever since!”

So I keep getting that kind of information all the time.

Now I must admit that the situation is getting a bit more tolerable, because the idea that vitamins might help schizophrenic patients is not as crazy anymore as it used to be.

And many universities are now beginning to look at this,

but it’s still going to take another 10 or 15 years,

and I can tell you since you’re working in France that the worse place in the world for orthomolecular treatment today is Europe.

In fact they’re trying to suppress the use of vitamins there.

– Ah, with the codex issue?
(nods yes)

– And you don’t think that the codex eventually through world trade harmonization is going to impact the United states?

I don’t think it will because the United States is pretty powerful
and I don’t think it will have much impact in Canada, because in Canada vitamins are considered drugs

They’re over the counter, but they are considered drugs and the European Union, Codex has nothing to do with drugs, it just has to do with nutrients.

But anyway I’m hoping not, but if they ever take vitamins off, they’re will be a fantastic black market developing in vitamins, worse than their is today with cocaine, or drugs.
’cause people who are well on vitamins are not going to take kindly to losing whatever is keeping them well.

So that’s briefly the situation.”

Patent System Failure – No Money, No Development of Treatments

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Actually, what you have to get across, is that, you know, you know what I think the problem is that we have a very stupid patent system. We should either destroy the whole patent system, or else make everything patentable. Had I been able to patent niacin, for lowering cholesterol levels. I’d be a millionaire.
51:15:15
today. Had we been able to patent a vitamin, if if Irwin Stone had been able to patent vitamin C as at treatment, the thing would spread like wildfire ‘cause the companies then would have a motive, they’d have a reason to go ahead and develop it. We have to have a way of dealing with natural compounds that are not patentable.
51:33:25
It’s very important.”

100M$ to Prove Use to FDA, Allows Unsafe Drugs but not Safe Nutrients

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Well, In 1992, the American, American Senate took away from the FDA the power to control nutrients. It’s left them free in the United States.
58:11:07
That’s why you can buy things over the counter in the States that you can’t buy in Canada. But the FDA still has some power to deal with toxicity and they also have power to prevent people from advertising. So you couldn’t claim. In the States it’s against the law to claim that water will cure something.

If you claim in the States that water will cure thirst, it’s against the law.

You can’t do that.
You can’t make a claim unless you prove it to the FDA.

And they now estimate it takes up to a 100 Million dollars to prove anything to the FDA.

So the nutrients have a big problem there. So the whole FDA structure has to be changed. I think myself, that they should go back to what they did many years ago before they where brought powers. I think the FDA should only have one function, to make sure that whatever is sold is safe.

They should have nothing to do with efficacy. They should only deal with toxicity. And we’d save ourselves a tremendous amount of money ‘cause no company would be allowed to sell anything that’s dangerous.

Vioxx wouldn’t have hit the market. Celebrex wouldn’t have hit the market. The tranquillizer probably would not have hit the market. Because they’re all, none of them are safe. But the natural compounds would because they’re all safe.”

Why Don’t all Doctors use it?

How Come Every Doctor Isn’t Using It? Pt1

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
– You predicted in 57 that by 97 your practices would be accepted. Why so long & has that come true?

Well, I was wrong, it’s now 50 years , just now we’re just beginning to see a trend.

It’s because it’s inherently in the nature of medicine to be very conservative or reactionary depending on your point of view.

If you read the history of medicine, you will find out that every major discovery took 40 to 50 years before it became introduced.

For example the stethoscope, you wouldn’t think there would be any opposition against the stethoscope. It took 40 or 50 years before that was accepted.

And it goes back years and centuries and centuries, medical proffesionnals all around the world are very conservative.

Now, maybe it’s in our genes. It’s built into our genes.

you ever read the bible?

You gotta read the bible. ‘cause it may not be true, it may be myth but still, there are some interesting stories there.

The question is when Moses left, led the Israelites out of Egypt, to take over the promised land. Why did it take 40 years? You can walk across in 2 weeks. Why did it take 40 years?Well the bible tells you. The bible’s not shy. The bible said that Moses realized that men and women that had been raised in slavery. They had been slaves in Egypt for 200 years. They had been raised in slavery. Didn’t have the guts to go ahead and conquer any land.

So he said let’s walk them around in circles for 2 generations until 2 generations are dead. And the young men and women who had been bred in freedom, will be the ones that take over the promised land. Isn’t that interesting?

– Wow

40 years!”

How Come Every Doctor Isn’t Using It? Pt2

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Well, that, there’s another bit of a story.

I was invited to give a talk to the nutrition section of the New York State Medical Association.

in New York City. So there, I was there and they gave me 18 minutes. They said we have 18 minutes. I said OK. There where about 20 people. At a round table. And so I began to talk, my presentation.

And as I was tallking.

A young professor from the university, fell asleep. Well that’s the way you deal with the information you want to hear. If you go to a dull lecture the best way to deal with that is to fall asleep.

That’s the best advice I can give you. So he fell asleep. So I thought that was interesting. He fell asleep. And being a well trained academic professor. He knew when to wake up. There’s a built in timer that says you have to wake up at a certain time. So I finished my lecture. He had wakened up and he was alert again.

So then he asked me what he thought was a devastating question.

He said, Dr Hoffer, he said, if your treatment’s so good, how come every doctor isn’t using it?

Standard question.

So I said to him, like I said to you, do you read the bible? He looked at me surprised. I said, well I’ll tell you why.

And I told him the story about Moses. And I said to him, when, doctors have been raised in freedom, from the old ideas of the medical profession, then this idea will start to be accepted.

Cause doctors are, doctors are slaves, I mean remember I said yesterday it’s a church? Medicine is a church and it’s very dangerous for a doctor to become a heretic in the field of medicine.

So that’s the problem.

It takes 20, it takes 40 years, this time, I think now because we are so well established as a monolithic organisation. It’s probably gonna take 50 or 60 years.

And think of the enormous waste, think of the enormous waste of people. Think of the thousands and millions of schizophrenic patients that could have been helped. If they had looked at our work seriously in 1957. Rather than waiting untill 2 0 0 5. Right now we are getting serious attention, and 3 medical schools which I won’t list, are now getting ready to start therapeutic trials to repeat our work.

It’s beginning to move. ”

Doctors Not Taught Nutrition, 1950s Essential. Nobel Prizes For Vitamins

Dr Abram Hoffer MD Doctors Not Taught Nutrition, 1950s Essential. Nobel Prizes For Vitamins

TRANSCRIPT:
“So nutrition has been neglected and I think that the reason for that is that until 1950, Nutrition was an essential element of medicine. It was one of the most important aspects of medicine.

And between 1930, between 1930 and 1940, which were the golden age of vitamin discovery. The medical profession took vitamins extremely seriously. And every time a scientist got the nobel prize for discovering a new vitamin,

everyone got very excited and alerted and, during these 10 years, a large number of very important papers where published by doctors dealing with these various vitamins. But in 1950, there was a major change.

The american medical, the medical profession, got the idea that we knew everything that was to know about nutrition.

Therefore they dropped it out of the medical curriculum. And they don’t teach it today, at UBC, that’s the university of British Columbia medical school, in 4 years medicine, they get one hour of nutrition. I spoke to a medical student from

east Ontario, and I asked her, how many hours of nutrition did you get and she said, “nearly, one hour”. And I said, what do you mean, nearly one hour? She said he never showed up.

Can you imagine? Doctors being trained for 4 years in medicine without having more than 1 hour of nutrition which is usually given to them by a professor of biochemistry. He may know his vitamins, he may know the chemistry of vitamins, but he knows nothing about nutrition.

There’s a major difference. So doctors today are almost totally ignorant and they know that, the leaders in the medical profession know, that they don’t know anything about nutrition.

And now that’s a major problem so, nutrition has fallen by the way side, it’s no longer taught anywhere. It’s left by it’s own, it’s kind of an orphan aspect of medicine. Now the genius of Dr Linus Pauling, was that the term OM highlighted what we were trying to do.

and it’s the best descriptive word there is. There’s no better word than that, ‘cause it refers to the use of the optimum amounts of the right nutrients, compounds that the body is familiar with. There not strange, there not things,

there not what you call xenobiotics, there not strange things.”

Modern Medicine Is a Religion and not a Science, We are the Heretics

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“because I haven’t been in any trouble, not any more than usual.

The trouble is that Drs don’t like new ideas. We’re out of the box. We have this crazy idea that you can help patients by giving them large doses of vitamins.

And the establishment thinks that no one needs vitamins. that everyone gets enough, that their diet is beautiful,
and besides they think that “schizophrenia, we don’t know what it is!”, that you have to use strong drugs.

They are following the line put out by the drug companies who spent hundreds of millions of dollars of research every year,
and who control the medical schools and the medical journals with their huge grants of money.

-Now, another point I found interesting that you were talking about is how diagnosis seems to change with fashion, about how Freud used to attribute schizophrenia to homosexuality?

Tthat’s right, well that doesn’t happen anymore luckily,

– Can we talk about how that evolved to show that science is not so sound and solid and hasn’t always been as people perceive them to be?

Well, as I see it, modern psychiatry is not scientific. And I’ll put it stronger, I think modern medicine is not a science at all, it’s a church, it’s a religion.

And like with any religion we have the orthodox, and we have the people who are the rebels. We have the high priests, who are the professors and the lecturers and the teachers,

we have the journals, which is like the bible.

We have the heretics like myself who are trying to change things.

It’s based upon science, but in itself it’s really not very scientific.

and in fact it’s not a bad thing, I think it’s more of an art and I think a good Dr can do a tremendous amount of good if he practices the art of medicine without thinking of himself as a scientist.

If they were scientific, they would not be using medication today, or they would be using it to a very small degree.

Now Freud, Freud died I think about 50 years ago. When I started out in psychiatry, it was still a common idea that you couldn’t become schizophrenic unless you were homosexual.

In other words, you couldn’t become para, paranoia, they thought was always based upon homosexuality.

Which again, we know that today is total nonsense. Right now, the current idea of schizophrenia is biochemical. But, very few psychiatrists know anything about chemistry, and they simply pay lip service to that idea.

But when you ask them, what do you mean? What kind of chemical change? They don’t know what you’re talking about.
They don’t know what the chemistry is.

Now where not sure either, but we have at least a hypotheses, that it’s caused by the increased conversion of adrenaline to adrenochrome.

And there is a fantastic amount of evidence to support that. It’s a pretty sound hypotheses right now. Its beginning to make some headway.

But it’s very slow.”

Practice of the Community – Can’t Demand Treatment Type

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
– Patients can demand this kind of treatment, can’t they?

yes they can, but they won’t get far.
– They won’t get far?

Not yet.

– Cause in the united states they’re pretty strong on malpractice.

Yeah they are, but you’ve got to remember that the doctors defence is that he’s doing what every other doctor is doing

– oh so that’s how it works?
(nods) and if 99% of the doctors say that they don’t use the treatment, then you can’t force a doctor to go ahead and use it.”

Public Must Demand Doctors Be Taught About Vitamins

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“My major complaint is that doctors have not been taught about the therapeutic values of the vitamins.

They just don’t know anything about it.
– How can we change the curriculum?

Public demand!

The public has to demand, and that’s happening to a small degree. I see patients here only on a referral. But mostly the patients demand from their doctor that they be sent here.

It has to be public demand, there has to be a recognition that there is a better way of treating these people then the way they do now.”

Medical Inertia

Medical Inertia, Years Before Folic Acid Accepted to Prevent Spina Bifida (Protrusion of Spine)

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“This was a Scottish physician who had done studies on the connection between post partum depression, no!,

between spina bifida & the blood, folic acid levels, of his female patients.

And he found that they where low, so he began to treat them with folic acid and he found that there was a 2/3 decrease in the incidence of spina bifida.

So he published that and this created a tremendous controversy. I remember in one issue of Lancet there where 5 letters to the editor. Everyone attacking this doctor for this nonsense that he was spouting.

And some of them even said that 1 mg a day of folic acid was very dangerous. Very very dangerous. Total nonsense! Anyway, this doctor defended himself by writing a book. Which I have, and eventually the idea didn’t die. And the American government and the English government eventually spent millions of dollars repeating what he had done.

And said yeah, he’s correct. Now it took them 15, 20 years to do that. And in that time, think of the thousand and thousand of case of Spina Bifida that could have been saved, had they taken his work seriously.

For a few dollars a year worth of folic acid, the American government has saved now billions of dollars every year, because in the States alone, every year 25,000 kids where born with Spina Bifida.

And the evidence in Canada was that every child with Spina Bifida, by the time their 12 will cost the health service 12,000$. It’s a huge economic safety.

Just by adding a tiny amount of folic acid, to their program. The Americans did the right thing they added it to their flour. So they now add folic acid to their flour. I think Canada has just come along recently and done the same thing, but I’m not sure about Canada.

So here an example where a tiny amount of money, spent wisely, has saved enormous amounts of money in terms of ill health.”

Medical Inertia, Shute Brothers, Vitamin E & Heart Disease, Cures Huntington’s

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“I knew the Shute brothers very well. They did some amazingly important work with vitamin E. The early, but they did that at a time when vitamin E wasn’t accepted as an important factor. No one knew what it did.

And they where saying it helps people with cardiovascular disease and with burns. So everyone laughed at them. This was totally wrong. Here was a compound that no one knew had any value. Yet these doctors where claiming it was valuable.

And Harvard medical school issued a bulletin, in 1960 claiming that they had examined their work very seriously and there was nothing to it.

nothing to it… totally wrong, we’ve all used vitamin E. It can be very very Effective.It’s one of the major fat soluble antioxidants. Extremely important, I use it also, for many conditions, heart disease. I also use it to cure Huntington’s disease.

Huntington’s disease is a disease considered incurable, and my patients get well by the combination of niacin plus vitamin E. Vitamin E in large doses I use up to 4000 units a day of vitamin E plus niacin to bring this condition under control.

So I think their work is valuable and it’s being accepted more and more. It’s being valuable.

But you’ll still find many papers being published claiming that it’s dangerous. But if you read these papers carefully there just shoddy, shoddy, terrible kind of material that should never have been published in the first place. ”

How it works

Schizophrenia & Adrenochrome, Niacin & Vitamin C to reduce oxidized adrenaline

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“But to come back to that,
so when humphrey brought this idea, we developed the hypotheses that there was an increased oxidation from adrenaline to adrenochrome which is an hallucinogen,

we then said, what can we do to prevent this reaction from occurring in the body? We wanted a treatment, we didn’t really care about the hypotheses we wanted to help these patients get well,

and so since I had my phd in biochemistry and vitamins, and I knew something about the vitamins, it occurred to us that we could use two vitamins that might protect the schizophrenic person from this change. And one of them is vitamin B3 which is known either as niacin or niacinamide and we figured out that this

could be helpful because it might cut down on the conversion of noradrenaline to adrenaline which in turn would cut down on the conversion of adrenaline to adrenochrome

and if we also added some vitamin C because we knew then, this was in 1952, we were way ahead of the game, and we were then talking about antioxidants which only became popular in medicine in the past 10 years.

We knew that vitamin C was an anti-oxidant, so we felt that by putting in large amounts of vitamin c, we could decrease the oxidation of adrenaline to adrenochrome.
So these were the two vitamins that we were going to use. ”

LSD Creates Schizophrenia Like Experience – Vitamin B6 & Zinc

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“You mentioned also that schizophrenics output a certain chemical in their urine?

That’s not only schizophrenics, other people do as well. That’s called the Pyrrole factor

We discovered that in 1960. I can tell you exactly what happened.

We where using LSD as a psychedelic treatment for alcoholism.

That started in Saskatchewan. And we treated about 2000 alcoholics in Saskatchewan over the period between 1954 and 1960.

And one day it occurred to me that in as much as the LSD experience and alcoholics was very similar to the schizophrenic experience.

Maybe it might also be an identity biochemically, In other words, did the LSD, create a chemical change in the alcoholic that was similar to what was present in schizophrenics?

So since we where routinely giving LSD to alcoholics, I ordered a sample of urine taken.

And at the height of the experience, which was 2 hours later, we took another sample of urine, And we sent, we sent the sample of urine down to our chemical laboratories for analyses.

And they found to my delight that there was, something appeared, in the 11 o’clock urine that was not there in the 9 o’clock urine.And later we identified that, we called it the mauve factor. It was a pink Factor that we didn’t identify.

And then we did a tremendous amount of studies, we found that this was present, in the majority of schizophrenic patients, but it was also present, in many people with depression that where not schizophrenic.

And it turns out today that this is a major discovery, and in Europe especially, there using it as a major measure of oxidative stress.

The mauve factor is a major measure of oxidative stress and there’s a, especially in Holland, a large number of doctors that are researching that particular discovery.

Now we found that patients who had that factor, and this was in cooperation with Dr Carl Pfeiffer, who was working in Princeton,

We found that if you give these patients a large amount of vitamin B6 and zinc, you get much better results.

So this became a way of determining, what kind of treatment you should give these patients.

So that’s, some of the best labs in the States are using it now.”

Irwin Stone & Linus Pauling’s intro to vitamin therapy

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Irwin Stone and I where very good friends, and I first met him in the early 60s at a meeting where Dr Linus Pauling was one of the main speakers.

And I met Irwin Stone and he told me that he had collected all the abstracts ever published on vitamin C.

And so I said to him Irwin, you better publish it as a book, Well, he said, it never occurred to him.

Anyway, 2 years later, again I told him you gotta publish that material, and that’s why he published his book.

Indications of Insanity, no..Anatomy, uh what’s it called, anatomy of, VitaminC, anyways, with Vitamin C,
– yeah

And it’s an excellent book, a really good book. Now at that meeting, Linus Pauling said,

– The healing factor?

Yeah, the healing factor!

Linus Pauling said that the research was so exciting, he wanted to be alive another 25 years so he could see what was happening.

So Irwin Stone wrote him a letter and said, Dear Dr Pauling, If you will take large amounts of vitamin C you will get those 25 years.

– I heard it was at a conference, Pauling had a cold .

No, it’s only partially correct, Pauling was subject to colds, Pauling used to get many colds. Not at that particular time, cause I heard him speak.

So as soon as he got that message from Stone he began to take vitamin C, and his colds disappeared, so he became very excited.

Now about this time, patients who had been taking vitamins on their own, Wrote to him and said they were getting better. So Linus became much more interested, and then an interesting story, we’ll finish up but this is an interesting story.

Our book, how to live with schizophrenia, there was a Doctor from Carmel, his son was 12, and schizophrenic and he was not responding to treatment. So this doctor called me up in 1960 and said what will I do, so I told him what to do and his son became normal.

Now this was a major event in that small town. It was kind of a miracle, here this doctor’s son became normal.

So there was a 2nd family there, and he was a prominent citizen, and his daughter, she was trying out for the Brooklyn Ballet Company. She was also psychotic, and so her father phoned me up and said, would you take her up for treatment, so I said ok.

Cause I was running some research and I was interested in patients that were difficult.

So she came up to Saskatoon where I put her on treatment, within a month she was better, she’s still well today. So her father thought this was a miracle, and he became a missionary,
he wanted every doctor in his town to know what had happened, so he bought a whole bunch of our books on how to live with schizophrenia and he began to visit each doctor in turn,

Leaving a book, and persuading them to read the book, and he left a book with a lady psychiatrist who was Eva Pauling’s friend.

So she took the book, and it was on her coffee table. One day Linus and his wife where having tea, afternoon tea with her, and as I read it, and he told the story himself, as I read it, while they were talking he looked at this book and it said how to live with schizophrenia. So he opened it up, and then he said to his friend, may I borrow the book tonight and she said by all means,

So he took the book, took it home that night and started to read it, he didn’t go to sleep that night, he read the whole night, finished the whole book, and he was very surprised, he was really surprised at the fact that we could give our patients 3000mg of niacin a day without any harm to them.

It was so totally new to him, now that changed his life because at that time, he had got 2 Nobel prizes, he was having a lot of trouble with his Universities who didn’t like him because of his, you know, he was outside the box.

And he was thinking of retiring, but when he read the book, he said no, I’m not gonna retire. And he accepted a job at UCLA as a distinguished professor. uh no, San Diego I think, as a distinguished professor of chemistry.

So then he began, he became, he took that book very seriously, and then I didn’t know this till later on, and then one day I read a letter from him.

And he said, Dear Dr Hoffer, I am submitting this manuscript to Science for publication. I’d like you to check it to be sure that I’ve referred to your work properly, isn’t that great?

He’s a real honest guy, so the paper was good, so I wrote back, I said excellent, beautiful job!

Then he published this paper in 1968 called Orthomolecular psychiatry.

And that started the ball rolling. So since that time, he and I became very close friends, and we in fact published a book together on Cancer.

well that’s another story which we can talk about tomorrow.”

Determining Dosage

Tailoring Schizophrenia Treatment – B3, vitamin C & More

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Ok, in talking about the treatment of schizophrenia, it’s not something you can do like reading a recipe book, it’s not a cook book, you can’t lay down a formula that works for everyone,

In each case you have to decide what you’re gonna use that will consist in a combination of B3, in large or small doses, and maybe some B6 might have to be used. We use vitamin C, usually if there is one deficiency you can bet on it that there are more than that.

So I use a B complex, and we’re now using the essential fatty acids which have been found to be extremely important, and then we use flax seed oil or some of the fish oils which are very helpful. We sometimes use other things as well like N-acetylcysteine

Selenium is sometimes used ‘cause it’s an important factor. So each time it’s tailor made for that particular individual.

There’s no single formula that can be applied routinely to every patient that you see. It just doesn’t work that way. And also I use drugs, I usually use them in very small doses, and usually I try to take them off as soon as I can.

There’s some where I can’t do it. Some people I have to give them such a tiny amount of drug, that they are controlled, but there are no side effects whatever, and that’s, I don’t mind that.

It’s the side effects, what I don’t like about drugs is the side effects. If they had drugs without side effects that would be great.”

Vitamin B3 Types & Uses, Niacin, Niacinamide,  Inositol Niacinate

Dr Abram Hoffer MD Vitamin B3 Types & Uses, Niacin, Niacinamide,  Inositol Niacinate

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TRANSCRIPT:
“-A lot of people keep going back and forth about Niacin vs niacinamide, vs the other non flush version?

Yeah, well, it’s called inositol niacinate, or non-flush niacin, it depends what you’re using them for.

If you’re using them for the treatment of schizophrenia , they’re all the same. There’s really no major difference, but there is a major difference in what they do because niacin lowers cholesterol levels, and that’s what we discovered in Saskatchewan.

So if I have a person who has a cardiovascular problem, or who has high blood cholesterol or has high trigliceride levels, if theyíre diabetic or they’re obese, if they have a cardiovascular problem then I prefer niacin rather than niacinamide because niacinamide doesn’t have any effect in these areas.

So that’s the major difference.

I like niacin because it’s the cheapest. Inositol niacinate is a lot more expensive. So I can’t start many of my patients on it because they can’t afford it. So usually I prefer niacin if they can tolerate it.

– Did you have luck with diabetes as well with the niacin?

Yeah, because the danger with diabetes is that you develop hardening of the arteries.

You lose your eyes and you lose your legs because of the cardiovascular complications.

If your taking niacin or taking the no-flush niacin, that’s not going to happen.

– Even with the no-flush niacin?

yeah. Not with niacinamide

– oh!

No, niacinamide doesn’t do that, just the no flush niacin will do that. It may not be quite as effective, you might have to use a little bit more. Instead of using 3g a day of niacin you might need to use 4 and a half g a day of the inositol niacinate.”

Niacin Safety 1, No Danger But Must Warn About Flush

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Well that’s true, and as a matter of fact, I think it would be considered malpractice, to give a patient niacin without telling him.

You don’t play tricks on people, you don’t give them niacin without telling them because you can have some terrible consequences, just from the fear. I can give you an example.

I had an internist from Detroit, came to visit me in Saskatoon many years ago, and he was so impressed by what he saw that he decided never to refer any more of his patients to a psychiatrist. He said he was going to do it himself.

One day he forgot to tell his patient that he was going to turn red on Niacin. The patient went home, picked up his two pills. He turned beet red become frightened to death. He immediately phoned up the nearest poison, nearest hospital,

Yeah, he forgot to tell his patient that he would turn red, flush, with the Niacin, when the patient came home and took his first pills, he developed his usal, typical, first flush, he became frightened because he hadn’t been told

it was going to happen and he phoned up the poison control center, the closest hospital in Detroit, and someone answered the phone and he told them what had happened and so they said to him, my god, they said, you have been poisoned by something, by Niacin, you better get down here immediately.

They sent the ambulance to pick him up, you could imagine this guys fear now. But by the time he got to the hospital the flush was gone and he was feeling fine. He should never have been allowed to take that without knowing.

That’s very important. Now, once you tell them that it’s going to flush, it depends how you do it. If you don’t like niacin yourself, you’ll tell your patient aw, I wouldn’t give you that stuff. It’s horrible, you’re going to turn red. It’s going to drop your blood pressure, and you’re going to frighten your patient so much, they’ll say well I don’t want to take it.

But if you understand what it is you’re working with, you can say well, don’t worry about it. You’re going to turn red, it’ll last an hour or two, it will be hot and itchy, it won’t hurt you any. It’s a natural reaction and every time you take it, you’ll flush less and less and less.

So that’s the approach that I use. It turns the danger, the only potential danger there is, that sometimes they get so frightened that their blood pressure drops and they might fall. This has happened in 2 or 3 cases I think in the last 50 years. So if the patient is concerned they take it sitting down or else you start with a smaller dose.

In terms of, there is no danger whatever , I’ve been taking niacin for 50 years. I don’t flush anymore.”

Niacin Safety 2, Oldest Canadian Took For 41 Years, No Effect On Coagulation

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“- Fears of thinning blood?

No, niacin has no effect on coagulation.

There is a, there is, I have, I’m very proud of a patient of mine living in Saskatoon, In Saskatchewan, she’s the second oldest Canadian. She’s a 111 years old.

And 2 years ago she was doing cross country skiing. Her mind is clear. She’s been on niacin for 41 years so you see how safe it is.

There’s nothing safer than niacin, there, there where, 40 years ago there where 1 or 2 cases of patients who died, because they where given the wrong preparation. They where given a funny kind of niacin preparation. They can’t even prove it’s due to niacin, but they did die while they were taking it.

In the years I’ve been using niacin, I haven’t had a single death, I haven’t had, uh, in the past 25 years I haven’t seen any cases of jaundice.

I haven’t seen any, so niacin I consider is very safe. But the flush, you have to know it’s gonna happen. You simply never take it unless you know what’s going to happen.”

Food Allergies, Nutritional Causes and Remedies

Nutrition Pt 1, Food Allergies Cause Syndromes,  Depression, Anxiety, Schizophrenia, OCD, MS

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“- Patients can demand this kind of treatment, can’t they?

yes they can, but they won’t get far.
– They won’t get far?

Not yet.

– Cause in the united states they’re pretty strong on malpractice.

Yeah they are, but you’ve got to remember that the doctors defence is that he’s doing what every other doctor is doing

– oh so that’s how it works?
(nods) and if 99% of the doctors say that they don’t use the treatment, then you can’t force a doctor to go ahead and use it.”

Nutrition Pt 2, Evolution of Food Supply, Needs Vary, Learn, Adapt or Die

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Nutrition is of course very important, I don’t mean just dieting.

I’m not in favor of dieting. Especially the kind of diet where you yoyo. Where you’re too fat, you lose weight, you regain it again, that doesn’t help very much.

I’m in favor of the body, providing for the body, all the essential nutrients that are needed and this follows the long great pioneers like Roger Williams, who was extremely impressive in the work that he did, showing that we are all individuals,

and that there is no panacea diet, there isn’t any one diet, that’s good for every one, this is one of the mistakes made by many of the people who write books.

They find that a diet helps themselves, they think, my god! This helped me it’s gonna help everyone else. It doesn’t work that way. So that’s why you have these huge number of diet books. High protein, low protein, high fat, low fat, high sugar, low sugar, This is not the way to go.

so when so , so you have to try to find out what is the best possible diet for individuals.

Now this is a problem today because our diets have been so changed in the past 10,000 years,

10,000 years ago the average diet did not include any grains, except sparingly, it did not include any
dairy products, there was no agriculture, did not include any sugar cause mankind hadn’t yet discovered how to grow sugar wheat? Or sugar cane.

So the diet 10,000 years ago to which we had adapted over the previous 100,000 or 200,000 years, was a diet that was rich in meat, fish, and no grains, rich in ah, rich in vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, and occassionaly if they found a bee hive with honey in it, they might be able to get some honey.

So that was the standard diet to which we had adapted, which I think is still the best diet in the world.

Now 10,000 years is a blink of an eye in terms of evolution.

And we have today have exactly the same nutritional apparatus that our ancestors had 10,000 years ago.
And yet our diet has enormously changed.

Our diet today consists primarily of the grains. Wheat, staple food: Wheat, rice & corn. These are staples, and these, these are not even in their natural form, these are refined. The grain, the wheat germ, the germ and the outer layer of these grains, which are the richest source of the B vitalins are removed, and fed to animals, they’re the ones that profit from this.

So the diets are really not good and I think that a large variety of today’s diseases are caused by the fantastic change in the diet which have occurred, especially in the past 100 years.

In 1945, in Canada, the average grocery store was very small, you might have 60 to a 100 items.

and if you went into an average grocery store in 1945, you could shop blind, no matter what you picked up, it wasn’t that bad.

It wasn’t that bad. (twice)

Because they had full grains. And they had meat and fish and so on.

If you go into a super market in Canada today with 20,000 items, most of which are junk, in fact the only safe place to shop at a super market is around the walls.

because that’s where you find your meat and your fish and your vegetables and fruit.

If you go to the center of the store, you find the packaged goods which are very attractive looking, smart design, taste good, in fact if you look at the cereal section.

The breakfast section, you’ll find maybe a 100 different types of cereals, that’s a lie. There’s not a 100 different types. They’re all made from the same thing, they’re all made from oats or wheat, sugar, and then various additives.

So our choice is not any greater today than it was, in fact it’s worse. Now we haven’t had the time yet to adapt,

to the change in our diet. This is happening to the detriment of our society I think.

that we will adapt eventually.

but nature, well, extorts a price, that we will have to die off, many of the people who can’t adapt or who are not intelligent enough to eat the way they should. ”

Nutrition Pt 3, Hoffer’s Rule 1 – Eliminate sugar

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Now I can’t give my patients a lecture.

I don’t have time, every morning, every time I see them, to give them a lecture. So I have a simple rule.

Two, the first rule is,

Junk free. Eliminate sugar, I define junk as any food containing added sugar, junk free.

And if you do that you find that you also eliminate 90% of all the other additives.

because if you read the labels of food, you never find sugar alone, you always find dyes, and colors and additives and preservatives, these are always present, so, junk free, knocks out 90% of the other additives.

If I tell my patients, cut down your sugar by half. They may cut it down 5 or 10%. If I tell them to cut it out entirely, then, they may cut it down by 80%.

Which is better than it was before, now, the advantage of junk free is that, you knock out all these prepared foods, the pastas,

uh, not so much the pasta but the uh, the uh, sugar uh desserts,

are knocked out, and they are generally devoid of the important minerals and vitamins. They’re not there.

So if you eat only a diet which is high in junk. Let’s say that 50% of your diet is sugar. You are not obtaining the right minerals and vitamins which the body needs, in order to use these foods properly.

So you are generally going to go into a chronic deficiency state. This is what I think is happening.

So junk free is the first rule.”

Nutrition Pt 4, Hoffer’s Rule 2 –  Find Out What Are They Allergic To

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“The 2nd rule is, that you might become sick, even with good food.

In that many people have allergies. Allergies are extremely common. This was first pointed out many years ago with doctor Marshal Mandel which was a clinical ecologist,

and at that time 30-40 years ago, we developed a term called cerebral allergy. This meant that although the food that you eat wouldn’t cause rashes and things like that, it would affect your brain and cause depression or schizophrenia.

or any one of the other psychiatric syndromes.

So the second thing is to find out what are they allergic to.

And I’ll give you an example.

I had a young male, man, he was 21, I saw him first about, saw him about 3, 4 months ago. And he told me he had been depressed all his life. Well usually that’s a signal to me. If it’s there all his life, it’s got to be a factor that has been present all his life. But what’s present in most of our lives, food. I’m sure you eat the way you did when you where 5 and I tend to eat the same way too. We all tend to consume the diet that we ate when we were children.

And he showed symptoms of a dairy allergy, a milk allergy, so I asked him to go dairy free, which he did, and uh, 2 weeks later, he was normal. The depression was all gone.

So now we do a (???), this is a therapeutic diagnostic test.

So I had told him that after a couple of weeks eat some dairy products, ice cream or whatever you like,

Two weeks after he was on the diet and he was feeling great. He ate some ice cream. And 2 hours later he was depressed again, and had brought back the original depression.

Worse than that, an hour after that he became psychotic.

He became terribly agitated, the family had to call the police to help restrain him, he had a terrible night, he fell asleep at 8:30 in the morning.

Awaken 3 hours later, and he’s been normal ever since.

He was impressed because the , he was allergic to dairy products and when you have an allergy it inflames the inner lining of the bowel, so you have gastro intestinal problems. You can’t absorb your vitamins and your minerals and therefore you begin to suffer major deficiencies. So that the two rules I have is: one, junk free, and secondly if there is a food allergy and usually more than one. Children the main ones are milk and sugar, adults may have milk and sugar and wheat and eggs. Staple foods only are the ones.

So that’s pretty much the way I use nutrition. ”

Nutrition Pt 5, She Was Allergic To Everything – General Allergies Caused By Milk

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“Just one more case before we wind up.

It may not be the only answer because when you have had a dairy allergy, milk tends to prevent the absorption of minerals and other nutrients. This is , this is known. So you develop a multiple general deficiency state. And you have to deal with that, that’s why you also have to use vitamins and minerals. So in addition to finding out what that food is that has been a factor in your illness, you have to also add the right vitamins and minerals.

And just two months ago a woman came to me, a middle aged woman came to me and she was, I thought, a really difficult problem. She was allergic to everything.

No matter what she put in her mouth she reacted adversly to it. Pills, vitamins, minerals, food, ver sick woman, she had been sick all her life, and I didn’t think I could help her anyhow, this is in way beyond my skills, she’s that sick. But she also had a dairy allergy and I was sure of that.

So she went on to a dairy free program and she came back a couple of days ago, she came back on Thursday, and I wasn’t looking forward to it, I was looking forward to another very sick woman complaining about not getting any better. To my surprise, She walked into the door, she was smiling and cheerful and happy, and for the first time in her life she felt very much better, she was almost halfway towards recovery.

Just by eliminating all dairy products. And it also meant that she was now able to tolerate some of the other things that before that she could not tolerate. Cause if you take away the major allergen, you then increase the ability of the body to deal with the minor ones. So that’s my view of nutrition.

But I don’t think you can relate any one food to any one disease, and if any one claims they can, they have to prove it to me.”

Other

About Andrew Saul & Doctoryourself.com

Dr Abram Hoffer MD About Andrew Saul & Doctoryourself.com

TRANSCRIPT:
“I can tell you a few cases if you like on Cancer.

– Can you Plug Saul?

Do you know Andrew Saul?

– I’ll be interviewing him on the way back

He’s very, He’s very good, he has an amazing website. One of the best.
Yeah, I like Andy Saul’s website I have contributed to it. I read it regularly.

He’s done an amazing job. He’s published my complete bibliography. Which runs about 600 records.

He also has a complete bibliography of other people like Cathcart, also he has Riordan’s and many others. It’s amazing, amazing, one of the best, and he gets thousands and thousands of hits every month. He’s doing really, his website is gonna be a major one at promoting what I call rational medicine.

Let’s not call it orthomolecular, that’s what it is, well, let’s call it rational medicine.

As compared to what modern psychiatry today, which is irrational medicine. So his website is
great. And it’s accurate, I read it all and it’s very accurate.”

Lighter Side of Dr Hoffer (Interview Interruption)

Dr Abram Hoffer MD TITLE

TRANSCRIPT:
“(beeps at door, secretary walks in,)

Hi Fran, we’re still at it.

Now you haven”t been here all night?

yes we have, (smiling) we’ve been here all night!

We’ll be done soon.

Ok I’m just gonna get changed.

Anyway”