Below you'll find reviews for Abram Hoffer's books on Orthomolecular Medicine. These reviews appeared originally in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.
To learn more about orthomolecular health or search the archives of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, visit www.orthomed.org or JOM archives .
Many of the books reviewed here can be purchased directly from us.
I. Healing Children’s Attention & Behavior Disorders
II. Healing Schizophrenia: Complementary Vitamin and Drug Treatments
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Healing Children’s Attention & Behavior Disorders
by Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.
CCNM Press, Toronto, 2004. Softcover, 342 pages
Review by Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D.
At lunch one day, as I poured a bunch of supplement tablets into my hand, Abram Hoffer quietly said to me, “You know, if you take all those vitamins, you’ll live a lot longer.” I paused just long enough for him to add, with half a smile, “It’s true; I guarantee it. If you don’t, come back and see me.”
There are few physicians who have sufficient age and experience to personally validate such a claim. Dr. Hoffer can. He pioneered megavitamin research and treatment back in the early 1950s, and, over the decades since, has repeatedly demonstrated success treating children’s behavior disorders using wholesome diet supplemented with high doses of vitamins.
For modifying diet, Hoffer’s near legendary “bedside” manner is direct and engaging. When he sits down with an ADHD child, he leans over towards the youngster and says, “No junk food. You know what that means.” Dr. Hoffer will compromise to insure compliance, allowing recalcitrant children once-weekly “junk food Saturdays.” This, predictably, results in some very sick Sundays, driving home the point with visceral experience rather than a lecture. And the lesson is re-learned well before school resumes on Monday.
Healing Children’s Attention & Behavior Disorders is concise and powerful. A timely reissue of the 1999 book, Dr. Hoffer’s ABC of Natural Nutrition for Children, pages 18-30 alone contain enough information to set modern medicine on its ear. This section forms the most elegant explanation of orthomolecular medicine since Linus Pauling's historic 1968 paper in Science.
Hoffer then devotes the rest of the book to setting out genuine nutritional alternatives to drug therapy for ADHD children. He provides vitamin dosage details, food tables, and over 150 references. Over 100 case histories are included, along with a "Bad Foods" list, numerous research summaries, precise recommendations for optimum diet, comparisons of drugs and vitamins, a discussion of allergies and food additives, behavioral self-tests, and, most importantly, a wealth of professional experience.
People often ask, "If this treatment is so good, how come my doctor doesn't know about it? How come it is not in the news?" The answer may have more to do with medical politics than with medical science. Consider Hoffer's views on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: "The DSM system (the standard of the American Psychiatric Association) has little or no relevance to diagnosis. It has no relevance to treatment, either, because no matter which terms are used to classify these children, they are all recommended for treatment with drug therapy" combined, sometimes, with other non-nutritional approaches. "If the entire diagnostic scheme were scrapped today, it would make almost no difference to the way these children were treated, or to the outcome of treatment. Nor would their patients feel any better or worse." Statements like these do not exactly endear one to the medical community.
I am acquainted with a 10 year old boy who was having considerable school and behavior problems. Interestingly enough, the child was already on physician-prescribed little bits of niacin, for a total daily dose of less than 150 mg. But it wasn't enough to be effective, and the boy was slated for the Ritalin-for-lunch bunch. Instead, Mom tried the lad on 500 mg of B3 three times daily, and immediately noticed improvement. When she doubled the dose to 3,000 mg/day (1,500 mg as niacin; 1,500mg as niacinamide) the gains at home and in the classroom were unmistakable.
For those who say there is insufficient scientific evidence to support orthomolecular therapy for children's behavior disorders, I say they haven't been looking hard enough. Hoffer and his colleagues conducted the first double-blind controlled vitamin trials in psychiatric history in 1952. He was among the first to employ vitamin C as an antioxidant and first to use the B-vitamins against heart disease. Dr. Hoffer has over 500 publications to date, and yet this single book (and he has written 20 others) will present the reader with the most comprehensive and comprehensible review of vitamin therapy for ADHD that I have yet seen.
The best part of Healing Children’s Attention & Behavior Disorders is that it is a book of practical, positive advice. Criticisms and even lawsuits over the hazards of tranquilizers and mind-modifying pharmaceuticals are on the rise, but neither court nor controversy can cure your child. "Battered parents" (Hoffer's term) need to know what to do, and now. Saying “no to drugs" also requires saying "yes" to something else. That something else is nutrition, properly employed. The simple way to determine whether vitamins will help your child is to try them. Reading Healing Children’s Attention & Behavior Disorders will provide invaluable guidance from the foremost authority on the subject.
- Originally printed in Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine Vol. 21, No. 4, 2006. Pg 229-230.
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Healing Schizophrenia: Complementary Vitamin and Drug Treatments
By Abram Hoffer, M.D.
CCNM Press, 2004. 213 pages, paperback.
I squirmed in my seat as I watched A Beautiful Mind, a popular film about the
Interestingly, when Dr. Hoffer meets with newly diagnosed patient, he actually says: “Good news: you have schizophrenia.” Patients’ reactions surely vary, but Dr. Hoffer does not. He immediately reassures them that they are neither mentally nor morally deficient, but rather that they are nutritionally dependent people, due to a gene-driven biochemical imbalance. He instructs most patients to immediately start taking 3,000 or more milligrams of niacin a day, plus extra vitamins including large amounts of vitamin C, in divided doses. He also requires patients to all but swear off junk food. These steps, along with minimal doses of medication, have resulted in thousands of biochemical cures of this supposedly biochemically incurable illness. In addition to being so responsive to nutritional treatment, schizophrenia is also “good news,” Hoffer says, because schizophrenics tend to be especially creative people who are unlikely to ever develop cancer.
Predictably, such an “easy” approach to such a “difficult” disease can only add up to medical heresy. For an heretic, Dr. Hoffer is remarkably well credentialed: With a Ph.D. in nutrition in addition to his M.D., he was formerly a director of psychiatric research, conducting the first placebo-controlled, double-blind experiments in the history of psychiatry. Perhaps more heretics should have his other expert qualifications: medical journal editor-in-chief for nearly forty years, private practice for fifty years, and some twenty-five books and well over 500 scientific publications.
For those who do not like “schizophrenic” as a label, let it be said that Dr. Hoffer doesn’t particularly care for it himself. “The word ‘schizophrenia,’” he writes, “serves no useful purpose either in referring accurately to a symptom or a disease, and will some day be replaced by more suitable diagnostic terms.” But as a rose by any other name still requires proper soil biochemistry, so do people called schizophrenics need niacin, and plenty of it.
Written in a confident yet unassuming style, Healing Schizophrenia: Complementary Vitamin and Drug Treatments covers schizophrenia from inside out, with chapters on cause and symptoms, how it is treated, and how it may be prevented. Hoffer’s directions on the fine points of niacin administration and vitamin safety are so enormously valuable that those sections alone make the book a must-read. A significant bonus is the inclusion of a questionnaire from the Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic Test for Schizophrenia in the final chapter. A recommended reading list is provided, although an index is not.
Long-time readers of Hoffer’s work will recognize much in the present book coming forward from his earlier works, How to Live with Schizophrenia (1966), Common Questions on Schizophrenia and their Answers (1987), and also Vitamin B-3 and Schizophrenia. Discovery, Recovery, Controversy (1999). Editing and updating are both extensive and seamless. Hoffer’s remarkable writing style is at the same time both scholarly and, with his many anecdotes, positively entertaining.
For those who may not like the idea of megadose niacin, but like the idea of schizophrenia even less, Dr. Hoffer is the author of choice. Moreover, now that he has retired from active practice, Healing Schizophrenia is more than just a timely publication: it is an essential one. To read Hoffer is the very next best thing to sitting down with him.
- Originally printed in Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine Vol. 21, No. 1, 2006. Pg 59-60.
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