Orthomolecular Medicine - History and Development

History and Development

In the early 20th century, some doctors hypothesised that vitamins could cure disease, and supplements were prescribed in megadoses by the 1930s. Their effects on health were disappointing, though, and in the 1950s and 60s, nutrition was de-emphasised in standard medical curricula. Orthomolecularists cite several figures from these early days of enthusiasm about nutrition as founders of their movement, although the word "orthomolecular" was coined by Linus Pauling only in 1967.

Amongst the individuals described posthumously as orthomolecularists are Max Gerson, who developed a diet that he claimed could treat diseases, which the American Medical Association's 1949 Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry found ineffective; and the Shute brothers, who attempted to treat heart disease with vitamin E. Several concepts now cited by orthomolecularists, including individual biochemical variation and inborn errors of metabolism, debuted in scientific papers early in the 20th century.

In 1948, William McCormick theorized that vitamin C deficiency played an important role in many diseases and began to use large doses in patients. In the 1950s, Fred R. Klenner also used vitamin C megadosage as a therapy for a wide range of illnesses, including polio. Irwin Stone stated that organisms that do not synthesise their own vitamin C due to a loss-of-function mutation have a disease he called "hypoascorbemia". This term is not used by the medical community, and the idea of an organism-wide lack of a biosynthetic pathway as a disease was not endorsed by Stone's contemporaries.

In the 1950s, some individuals believed that vitamin deficiencies caused mental illness. Psychiatrists Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer gave people having acute schizophrenic episodes high doses of niacin, while William Kaufman used niacinamide. While niacin has no known efficacy in psychiatric disease, the use of niacin in combination with statins and other medical therapies has become one of several medical treatments for cardiovascular disease.

In the late 1960s, Linus Pauling introduced the expression "orthomolecular" to express the idea of the right molecules in the right amounts. Since the first claims of medical breakthroughs with vitamin C by Pauling and others, findings on the health effects of vitamin C have been controversial and contradictory. Pauling has been criticised for making overbroad claims.

Later research branched out into nutrients besides niacin and vitamin C, including essential fatty acids.