Abram Hoffer-Part 2

Abram Hoffer (November 11, 1917 – May 27, 2009) was a Canadian psychiatrist known for his claims that nutrition and megadoses of vitamins are effective treatments for schizophrenia. This general approach, called orthomolecular medicine by its proponents and questioned by most of the mainstream medical community, includes the use of megavitamins and is commonly called megavitamin therapy.

Biography
Hoffer received a degree in agriculture from the University of Saskatchewan in 1938, followed by a Masters degree in agricultural chemistry in 1940. He received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1944 with research into vitamin content of cereals. Hoffer graduated with an MD from the University of Toronto in 1949 and completed psychiatric training in 1954.
Hoffer was a faculty member of the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan from 1955–67 and served as the Director of Psychiatric Research for the Saskatchewan Department of Public Health in Regina from 1950–67. He stated that half the patients housed in the mental hospital were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and that the conditions in the mental hospital and the treatment of these patients were poor, and looked for better answers to treat the mentally ill. Critical of psychiatry for its emphasis on psychosomatic psychoanalysis and for what he considered a lack of adequate definition and measurement, Hoffer felt that biochemistry and human physiology should be used instead. He hypothesised that schizophrenics lack the ability to remove a hallucinogenic metabolite adrenochrome from their brains. He speculated that he could decrease the concentration of adrenochrome in the brain by using vitamin C to reduce adrenochrome to adrenaline and using niacin as a methyl acceptor to prevent the conversion of noradrenaline into adrenaline. Hoffer called his theory the "adrenochrome hypothesis".

To be Continued...