Abram Hoffer and Linus Pauling at the symposium, “Adjuvant Nutrition in Cancer Treatment,” Tulsa, Oklahoma, November 1992.
We have written before on both the orthomolecular psychiatry of Linus Pauling and the birth of orthomolecular medicine, which has its roots in nutritional (later called orthomolecular) psychiatry. This post delves further into how orthomolecular psychiatry came to be, as well as its marginalization out of the scientific mainstream.
It all began with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who, in 1938, famously synthesized LSD and discovered its psychedelic properties. After several trials, some on himself, Hofmann developed the hypothesis that LSD mimics the effects of psychosis.
Hofmann’s idea inspired two English psychiatrists, Dr. Humphry Osmond and Dr. John Smythies, to further his research in the late 1940s. Using mescaline (derived from the peyote cactus) as their basic compound, the duo took Hofmann’s work a step further, eventually conjecturing that schizophrenics suffered from an overdose of an endogenous (made in the body) toxin that was similar in structure to mescaline and LSD.
Finding no sympathy in England – at the dominated by Freudian thought – Osmond and Smythies took their work to Saskatchewan, Canada, relocating there in late 1951. Once in Canada, Osmond met Abram Hoffer, a fellow psychiatrist with whom he would collaborate for decades. Together, Hoffer and Osmond ran the psychiatric sciences and therapies divisions of the psychiatric hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, which housed a number of schizophrenic patients.
Hoffer and Osmond eventually discovered the toxin that Osmond and Smythies had suspected was causing the psychoses present in schizophrenics: adrenochrome, a byproduct of the body’s metabolic oxidization of adrenaline and noradrenaline. The next step in helping their patients, the doctors felt, was to find some way to alleviate the psychoses brought about by schizophrenia. This led them to nicotinic acid, also known as vitamin B3 or niacin. Niacin, they learned, was known anecdotally to help patients with neuropsychiatric disorders. This fit with the fact that pellagra, a disease caused by a deficiency of niacin, sometimes presents with psychiatric symptoms.
Eager to test their theory that vitamin B3 could help alleviate mental disease, Hoffer and Osmond began experimentation, dosing their schizophrenic patients with large amounts of niacin by adding it to their daily diets in the first double-blind tests performed in psychiatry. Once the experimentation was finished, Hoffer and Osmond followed their patients for ten years, measuring the effectiveness of their added-vitamin therapy in terms of readmission rates and ability to find outside employment once released from the hospital.
In 1962 Hoffer and Osmond published the book Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry, the text that introduced Linus Pauling to the duo’s megavitamin work. The book revivified his interest in the biochemical basis of mental illness, which he had been studying for a decade, having previously learned that phenylketonuria is a molecular disease in much the same way as sickle-cell anemia.
By the time Pauling read the niacin book, anecdotes about megavitamin therapy, as it was then called, had begun to spread. Additionally, it had already been discovered that niacin could lower cholesterol levels. When added to his prior knowledge, these facts led Pauling to find the evidence presented in the book compelling enough to merit further investigation. The final ingredient to Pauling’s interest appeared the next year, when Dr. Irwin Stone introduced Pauling to the potential health benefits of large doses of Vitamin C. .
It wasn’t until 1967 that Pauling coined the term “orthomolecular,” using it in print for the first time in a paper titled “Orthomolecular Methods in Medicine.” In 1968 Pauling wrote his more famous paper on the subject, “Orthomolecular Psychiatry,” published in the journal Science. Pauling, of course, went on to found the Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine with Art Robinson in 1973, (soon after renamed the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine) and co-edit the book Orthomolecular Psychiatry: Treatment of Schizophrenia in the same year. Around this time, Pauling also began broadening his theory of orthomolecular medicine to include the whole body, not just the mind.
But what happened to Hoffer and Osmond? The answer to this question plays a part in understanding why many doctors today still refuse to consider orthomolecular medicine a legitimate form of treatment.
In 1967 Hoffer and Osmond formed both the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation and the American Schizophrenia Association. The two doctors had recently been encountering a great deal of resistance to the publication of their ideas, so they started their own journal, the Journal of Schizophrenia, in the same year. They asked Pauling to serve on the editorial board; Pauling agreed, participating in that capacity for the rest of his professional life.
In 1973 orthomolecular psychiatry was dealt a serious blow by the American Psychological Association Task Force. That year, the group published a report titled “Megavitamin and Orthomolecular Therapy in Psychiatry,” condemning the practice as unsupported at best and “deplorable” at worst. Hoffer and Osmond were subjected to humiliation and orthomolecular psychiatry was deemed unworthy of study or application. The following year, Pauling responded to the report, pointing out a number of flaws, including errors in methodology, lack of research, confusion of focus, and bias:
Orthomolecular psychiatry is the achievement and preservation of good mental health by the provision of the optimum molecular environment for the mind, especially the optimum concentrations of substances normally present in the human body, such as the vitamins….The APA task force report Megavitamin and Orthomolecular Therapy in Psychiatry discusses vitamins in a very limited way (niacin only) and deals with only one or two aspects of the theory. Its arguments are in part faulty and its conclusions unjustified.
But Pauling, Hoffer, and Osmond’s expressions of outrage at perceived mistreatment by the APA weren’t enough to overcome further obstacles that lay ahead. For one, in the mid-1970s, orthomolecular psychiatry, rather than sticking to megavitamin doses, expanded to include diet in the treatment of mental health, as well as avoiding stimulants like nicotine. However, no consensus was reached within the community with regard to precise standards for the practice, so recommendations varied from doctor to doctor, making the efficacy of orthomolecular psychiatry difficult to evaluate.
The mainstream introduction of tranquilizers and the phasing out of electroconvulsive therapy in the treatment of mental illness also proved a barrier to the orthomolecular community. Tranquilizers, unlike megavitamins, were immediately successful in alleviating symptoms, making orthomolecular medicine, which took time to work, appear ineffective by comparison.
Eventually, whenever a patient would ask about megavitamin or orthomolecular therapy as an alternative treatment, many doctors would simply cite the APA report, claiming that it had disproven orthomolecular methods. After a while, most patients simply stopped asking.
The American Schizophrenia Association eventually became the Huxley Institute for Biosocial Research, still led by Abram Hoffer. Dr. Hoffer asked Pauling to serve on its board of directors but Pauling declined, by then more interested in pursuing Vitamin C in the treatment of cancer and colds. The flagging in his energy for the discipline of orthomolecular psychiatry was indicative of the lack of momentum within the field, a situation that persisted for the remainder of Pauling’s life.
