This article appeared in Schizophrenia Digest, Spring 2008, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pg 24-28.

Journalist Paul Forsyth presents a balanced examination into the controversy surrounding this alternative treatment therapy to combat symptoms of schizophrenia. 

Orthomolecular Medicine

Can vitamins help those that medications have failed?

By Paul Forsyth

Nearly 40 years ago, Tom Krampf felt there was no hope.

It was the late 1960s, and Krampf’s life was on a downward spiral. The New York writer and his engineer wife, Francoise, had moved to France, and Krampf—who would later be diagnosed with schizophrenia—was already troubled by symptoms of the disorder and took a large overdose of prescribed drugs.

In the hospital, he was put in a room next to a window on the fourth floor. “I actually stepped out the window,” he says. He fell four storeys and was badly injured. He returned in a body cast with his wife to New York City and began a long physical rehabilitation.

But his physical injuries were only a fraction of his problems; back in the Big Apple, he had another breakdown and was hospitalized. “My illness got increasingly worse,” he says.

Krampf saw psychiatrists who prescribed a powerful first-generation antipsychotic. The side effects were terrible, and Krampf—a poet—was unable to write because the drug put him in an almost catatonic state.

“I’m a writer, but I couldn’t create,” he recalls. But without the medication, Krampf was wracked by terrifying hallucinations.

“I couldn’t even walk down the street. I saw blood running from people’s mouths, and skeletons.”

And the advice he got from psychiatrists gave him little hope: “I was told I would never be well again,” he says. “I was telling my wife she should separate from me.”

An alternative approach

Things changed for Krampf, now 73, when he hooked up with the late psychiatrist William Douglas Hitchings, MD, a Canadian doctor working in New York. Hitchings was a believer in orthomolecular psychiatry, a controversial field of medicine that proposes mental abnormalities can be treated by correcting imbalances or deficiencies among naturally occurring biochemical constituents of the brain—most notably vitamins and other micronutrients.

Typically, orthomolecular treatment includes taking mega-doses of vitamins, often much more than the recommended daily dose, along with such things as amino acids. Dietary changes are also frequently part of treatment.

Advocates of orthomolecular medicine insist it is a superior option to taking antipsychotic medications alone, but for decades mainstream science has remained skeptical, saying claims of its efficacy come in a vacuum of controlled, scientific studies into the effectiveness and safety of such treatments.

Krampf started a regimen of high doses of Vitamin C, E, and niacin, and began researching how diet can contribute to mental illness. Other doctors he spoke with dismissed the connection.

“They just laughed,” he says. “They said it would never work.”

The vitamin treatments, along with a modified diet, which excluded high levels of sugar and processed white flour, progressively alleviated Krampf’s hallucinatory symptoms, he says, leading him to believe that those symptoms were the end result of wildly fluctuating glucose levels in his blood that played havoc with his organs—such as his pancreas—which in turn messed with his brain chemistry.

“The effect of the treatment was the closest thing to a miracle you could find,” Krampf says. “If I went back to eating the way I used to, I’d probably end up in hospital again.”

Skepticism prevails

The term “orthomolecular” was coined in 1968 by Nobel prize-winning U.S. scientist Linus Pauling, PhD, who worked with Victoria, British Columbia, physician Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, to promote vitamins, amino acids, and minerals as treatment for mental illness. Pauling died in 1994, but Hoffer says that over the past 50-plus years, he has helped thousands of people with schizophrenia recover through orthomolecular medicine.

Yet the skepticism that set in early among the broader medical community has endured, in large part because of what is seen as a lack of placebo-controlled studies, such as those used to test new medications before they are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Health Canada.

In 1973, an American Psychiatric Association task force found that in the few studies that have been conducted on orthomolecular treatment, there were numerous methodological flaws. Likewise, the Canadian Psychiatric Association has taken the position that there is “no good scientific evidence” that mega-vitamin therapies are effective, and that high doses of some vitamins can actually have toxic side effects.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists issued a position statement in 2004, warning that orthomolecular treatment involving vitamin doses of up to 600 times the recommended daily allowance can result in dangerous side effects, such as convulsions and blood circulation problems.

“There is no scientific substantiation of the therapeutic (effectiveness) of orthomolecular psychiatry in the treatment of psychiatric disorders,” the College wrote.

Additionally, in 2006, a 13-member panel of experts in fields such as biochemistry, human nutrition, disease prevention, and toxicology was appointed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to examine current data on the effectiveness and safety of multivitamins and minerals. The panel said that in light of a lack of data—combined with the fact more than half of Americans take dietary supplements, and the potential for people to ingest too-high levels of supplements—changes in the regulation of dietary supplements are recommended. They include “rigorous, randomized, controlled trials” on supplements and reporting possible side effects on labeling in the same fashion as FDA-regulated drugs.

“Most of the public assumes that the components of…supplements are safe, because many of the ingredients are found in everyday foods and the products are available over-the-counter,” the panel wrote.

In response, Hoffer and six other colleagues issued a statement through a group they called the Independent Vitamin Safety Review Panel, calling the NIH panel’s findings biased. Hoffer’s panel said the NIH ignored the more than 600 scientific papers and studies published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine—which Hoffer established decades ago—leading to a “politically predetermined conclusion that vitamins are somehow dangerous.”

Hoffer said that in his 50 years of clinical experience, he has not seen any life-threatening side effects nor any deaths from orthomolecular treatment.

“Vitamin supplements are extraordinarily safe and effective,” he said. “It is drugs that are dangerous. Perhaps the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is getting tired of all the bad news about drugs, so instead they are going after nutritional supplements.”

Actress Margot Kidder, best known for her role as Lois Lane in the 1970s and ’80s Superman films, is a high-profile advocate of orthomolecular medicine. After suffering from manic depression and years of conventional treatment from psychiatrists (plus a high-profile breakdown in the 1990s), she has been symptom-free for more than 10 years through orthomolecular treatment, she told the Montreal Gazette when she spoke in that city in 2006. “I finally realized that drugs were not the answer,” she told the Gazette’s Donna Nebenzahl. “Listen, the drugs they give people with mental illnesses would make a well person sick.”

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