ABRAM HOFFER WAS A PSYCHIATRIC CONTRARIAN

He Dedicated His Life To Developing Alternative Medical Therapies For
Psychiatric Patients

Do no harm is the basic tenet of the physician's credo and that is
the way psychiatrist Abram Hoffer practised orthomolecular medicine,
one patient at a time, for more than 50 years. His theories about the
benefits of vitamins and nutrients were dismissed by the medical
establishment and Big Pharma - as he invariably described the
international drug companies.

Nonetheless, thousands of patients, many of them desperately ill from
cancer or dangerously debilitated by schizophrenia, lauded him for
giving them a longer or better quality of life. And his belief in the
power of nutrition remains a foundation of naturopathic medicine and
the health food movement.

Dr. Hoffer died on May 27 in Victoria. He was 91.

He came to medicine from biochemistry and already had a PhD when he
went to medical school in the late 1940s. That perspective as a
researcher, as well as the independent streak nurtured while working
on his parents' farm in southern Saskatchewan in the Depression,
helped mould him as a contrarian in the medical profession.

Early in his career he worked with Humphrey Osmond, the British
psychiatrist who gave Aldous Huxley LSD and coined the word
psychedelic. Both men realized that by ingesting hallucinogens,
healthy people experienced schizophrenic-like delusions. Like Albert
Hoffmann, the Swiss scientist who synthesized LSD in 1938, they
foresaw the therapeutic use of hallucinogens in psychoanalysis and in
treating schizophrenics. And they believed, as did Dr. Hoffmann, that
LSD had been first hijacked by Timothy Leary and the 1960s
counter-culture and then medically demonized by its authoritarian and
establishment critics.

That is not to suggest that Dr. Hoffer was a pill pusher. The
opposite is true. He believed that eventually drugs will become
"minor aspects of modern medicine rather than the major treatment and
preoccupation of the medical establishment" as he wrote in his
memoirs, Adventures in Psychiatry . Instead, he argued that the route
to good health lay in assessing and then providing the "optimum
amount of the basic nutrients" needed by each person.

"The origins of disease, in my opinion, are not genetic; no genes are
bad genes. Any genes that are truly bad would destroy the individual
before birth," he wrote in Adventures in Psychiatry . "If multiple
sclerosis strikes at age 25, why were the genes supposedly at fault
doing so well until then," he asked rhetorically. The problem is not
our genes, but the way we abuse them through "the intake of incorrect
or inadequate nutrients (and what is correct and adequate is unique
to each person) or by radiation or chemical injury."

His favourite example of how nutrients can be of huge epidemiological
benefit to society was the U. S. government's decision in 1942 to
mandate that flour had to be enriched with vitamins during the
milling process. Consequently, the incidence of pellagra, a vitamin
deficiency disease caused by a lack of niacin (vitamin B3) plummeted.
Pellagra, usually diagnosed by the presence of the four Ds -
diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and death, if untreated, within four
or five years - was endemic in the poorer parts of the southern U.S.
a century ago.

"This legislation was probably one of the greatest single public
health measures ever introduced," according to Dr. Hoffer. "It has
prevented millions of people worldwide from getting and dying from
pellagra."

Until the end of his long life, Dr. Hoffer remained optimistic that,
like Galileo, he would be proved correct.

When Israel Hoffer and his older brother Meyer fled Hungary with
their wives in 1904, they headed for southern Saskatchewan, lured by
the promise of bountiful land and the possibility of saying farewell
to religious persecution. They dug into the fertile prairie, built
themselves sod houses and began tilling the soil and raising a new
generation. By the time Abram, the fourth of Israel and his wife
Rose, was born on Nov. 11, 1917, the family had built a wooden house.

Abram went to one-room schools and worked in the fields, along with
his siblings and the hired hands, "cutting and raking and stoking,"
as he said in a 2006 interview with journalist Rob Wipond. Working 10
hours a day, often seeing nobody but other members of the threshing
crew, made him so self-reliant that "I got to the point that I would
sooner look upon things myself rather than take people's opinion of
them."

His father wanted Abram to work the farm after he graduated from high
school but his mother's fervent wish that he get a university
education prevailed. In 1934, he entered the University of
Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, concentrating on agricultural chemistry,
and graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Science in
Agriculture (BSA) with great distinction.

By 1940, armed with a master's degree in agricultural biochemistry,
he began, with the help of a scholarship, to work toward his
doctorate at the University of Minnesota. His money ran out after a
year, so he accepted a job setting up a laboratory to measure
thiamine (vitamin B-1) levels in grain products at Purity Flour Mills
in Winnipeg. By streamlining the measuring process, he was able to do
the research on his PhD thesis (on the distribution of thiamine in
wheat kernels) while holding down a full-time job.

Realizing that his real appetite was for original research, he quit
the flour mill in 1945 and moved with his wife Rose and young son
Bill to Saskatoon to begin medical school at the University of
Saskatchewan. Accustomed to a scientific education that was heavy on
reasoning, he was unimpressed by the emphasis on memorization in his
medical training.

Nevertheless, he earned his degree in the spring of 1949 and began
interning at City Hospital in Saskatoon. After a year seeing a
variety of acute and chronically ill patients, some of whom suffered
from psychosomatic afflictions, he determined to combine his
knowledge of chemistry and medicine and pursue a career in
psychiatric research.

Psychiatry was a wide open field. Mental institutions were more akin
to prisons than hospitals, lobotomies were standard modes of
treatment and tranquillizing drugs were not yet generally available.
Dr. Hoffer and his wife spent January and February, 1951, touring
research centres in Canada and the U.S., absorbing new techniques
including the experimental use of hallucinogens, such as mescaline,
in treating schizophrenia.

That July, he moved his family, which by now had expanded to include
three children, to Regina where he was a resident in the psychiatric
wing of Regina's General Hospital, a consultant in biochemistry to
the hospital's pathology department and director of psychiatric
research for the Department of Public Health. Although he was crazily
busy, he also made $15,000 in combined salaries from his three jobs,
which was a huge amount and considerably more than the premier of
the province earned annually.

Humphrey Osmond, the British trained psychiatrist, who had
experimented in England with mescaline on healthy volunteers and
discovered the effects were similar to schizophrenic delusions,
arrived that fall as clinical director of the mental hospital in
Weyburn. The hospital had about 5,000 patients, half of whom were
schizophrenics.

Working together with English researcher John Smythies, the clinical
trio theorized that there is an abnormal production of adrenochrome,
a derivative of adrenalin, in schizophrenics and it is this excess
which triggers the disease, rather like self-intoxication by the
body's unwitting production of hallucinogenic compounds.

According to their research, patients who were given niacin had
double the recovery rate over a two year period. They also tried
hallucinogens on diehard alcoholics with encouraging results on the
assumption that LSD could cause symptoms similar to delirium tremens
and thereby scare or shock alcoholics into sobriety.

Although the medical community, which was largely committed to the
"talking cure," remained largely unconvinced of the beneficial
effects of a vitamin regimen or hallucinogenic drugs, the researchers
did persuade Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling to embrace their cause.
Dr. Pauling came up with the term, orthomolecular psychiatry, to
describe this diagnostic approach and megavitamin treatment plan.

Frustrated by what he saw as the collusion between the pharmaceutical
industry and the medical establishment to push tranquillizers on
patients, Dr. Hoffer resigned his official positions at the
University of Saskatchewan and the Department of Public Health and
went into private practice in the middle 1960s. He became active in
the Canadian Schizophrenic Foundation and founded the Journal of
Orthomolecular Medicine.

After nearly a decade in private practice, the Hoffers moved to the
West Coast in 1976, settling in Victoria, which appealed to them
because of its temperate climate and its lack of a medical school.
Dr. Hoffer was 59. "I was by now all too familiar with the town and
gown antagonisms in cities inhabited by professors from the medical
schools and I wanted to avoid them," he wrote in Adventures in
Psychiatry .

In 1996, he felt coerced into retirement when a joint decision by the
B.C. government and the B.C. Medical Association revoked billing
numbers for doctors when they turned 75. Dr. Hoffer, then 79,
protested that he was nowhere near ready to retire. He wanted to keep
on seeing patients and to be able to bill the health system for his
medical services and so he applied for an exemption on Jan 2, 1997.
Eventually his appeal went to the B.C. Supreme Court, which ruled, in
July, 1999, against mandatory retirement for doctors who passed
competency tests. He finally retired from his private psychiatric
practice in 2004, although he continued to provide nutritional
consultations through his Orthomolecular Vitamin Information Centre
in Victoria.

Dr. Hoffer leaves his son John, his daughter Miriam and his extended
family.