Adventures in Psychiatry: The Scientific Memoirs of Dr. Abram Hoffer, by Dr. Abram Hoffer.
Kos Publishing Inc.2005. ISBN 0-9731945-6-1.
Can.$ 30. At bookstores or from the publisher by fax 519-927-9542, phone 519-927-1049, or from www.kospublishing.com – email info@kospublishing.com. Bulk order discount 50% starts at more than 5 copies; shipping charges added.

Dr. Abram Hoffer’s life could justly be described as being an essential nutrient in its own right. Such research, being based on the right questions, correct observations, and relevant assumptions, functions like a vitamin, mineral, or essential fatty acid for the growth of medical knowledge. This is so because such research sustains and nourishes every branch of inquiry it comes in contact with.

This book is a feast for the mind and the spirit. For those of us who have learned, through painful personal experience that drugs, surgery, and most of high-tech medicine offer only very temporary benefits, but rarely if ever a cure, this book tells the wonderful story of the rebirth of nutritional medicine. Here the reader gets a magisterial overview of the resurrection of nutritional medicine in the 20th century and its placement on new foundations of rigorous scientific methodology made possible by the simultaneous developments in biochemistry.

Over the past 60 years, Abram Hoffer’s life’s work has systematically transformed and informed major areas of modern medicine to the benefit of thousands of patients. And now we have a book in which he tells the story of a lifetime in research and clinical practice himself. Today, what is known about addiction, depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorders, the nutritional role in cancer prevention and treatment, the connection between stress and mental health, the nutritional deficiencies acting in synergy with vaccine toxicity in autism and the nutritional regimes to reverse this condition, as well as the nutritional treatment of cardiovascular/lipid disorders was either pioneered by Dr. Hoffer or co-developed alongside other giants in those fields, such as two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (who coined the term orthomolecular medicine), Theron Randolph (the father of environmental medicine), Humphrey Osmond, Roger Williams (discoverer of Pantothenic acid and other B vitamins), Irwin Stone (vitamin C pioneer), Bernard Rimland (autism research pioneer) and many others.

This book will enthrall those practicing naturopathy, pediatrics, environmental medicine, and addiction medicine. Medical historians will be fascinated. Patients looking for the basic science involved in the use of nutrition as prevention and treatment of mental disease will find it explained and contextualized for lay readers to get a better understanding of the block- headedness of much mainstream medicine. This book also has a virtually complete bibliography of Dr. Hoffer’s writings. Given that this octogenarian is currently working on 4 books, it is of course impossible to be completely up to date.

“Adventures in Psychiatry” is dedicated to Tommy Douglas who was Premier of Saskatchewan when Dr.Hoffer was professor of psychiatry in Regina. Douglas energetically supported Dr. Hoffer’s efforts to humanize the appalling conditions in the mental asylums of that time and encouraged the research begun into the nutritional deficiency connections to mental disease.The unique tongue-in-cheek humour and coolly factualnarrative style of Dr. Hoffer’s writing makes reading this

We follow the author from his Saskatchewan farm childhood, subsequent training in bio-chemistry and agricultural science, his early insights into the central importance of soil and plant food quality to human and animal health, to his specialization in psychiatry, professorship at the University of Saskatchewan, and above all his daily work with patients. We learn of his disillusionment with traditional methods of treating the mentally ill (e.g. lobotomies), and we share his excitement of discovery as we follow his dramatic case histories, which unfold like detective-stories, as he uncovers the connection between deficiencies in specific nutrients and mental illness. One example is that of the first patient successfully rescued in the early 1950’s from end-stage catatonic schizophrenia through vitamin therapy:

“Ken