Page 46 - Complementary and Alternative Medicine Treatments in Psychiatry

46 | Complementary and Alternative Medicine Treatments in Psychiatry

A Brief History
What we now call nutritional or “orthomolecular” psychiatry
began in a university laboratory in the early 1950s in Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan, Canada. At that time Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.,
and his colleague Humphry Osmond, M.D., (who coined the term
“psychedelic”) along with another physician, John Smythies,
M.D., hypothesized that the origins of schizophrenia could be
related to an abnormality of adrenaline metabolism, creating
hallucinogenic metabolites which could be alleviated with niacin
(vitamin B3). Hoffer, with his background in animal husbandry
and biochemistry, undertook what is believed to be the first
double blind studies in psychiatry. (In the interest of full
disclosure, one of the writers—Vickar—is Dr. Hoffer’s nephew.)
Numerous studies were published in the 1950s as the work
unfolded (Agnew 1955, Hoffer 1957). Publishing the results of a
nine-year study in the Lancet, Hoffer continued to find that those
patients blinded to placebo versus niacin or niacinamide showed
significant improvement only to the vitamin and definitely
separation from placebo (Hoffer 1962). The results were exciting
to them during a time when the only treatments were
barbiturates, ECT, insulin shock therapy, and restraints.
However, at the same time chlorpromazine had been introduced
by Heinz Leiman in Montreal and the results were so dramatic
that the idea that a vitamin could do something paled in
comparison and did not gain traction.
In the 1960s, two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, who had
been doing his own research on Vitamin C and the common cold,
was attracted to Hoffer’s work and joined Hoffer and like-
minded scientists in advancing the cause. In listing the available
psychiatric treatments of the period, Pauling remarked, “I have
reached the conclusion that another general method of
treatment, which may be called orthomolecular therapy, may be
found to be of great value, and may turn out to be the best
method of treatment for many patients.” Pauling defined