A new documentary on the orthomolecular treatment of schizophrenia.

Produced by Sisyphus Communications in conjunction with the ISF. 49 minutes, 1998
The ISF has produced a documentary on the orthomolecular approach to mental illness, and the finished film is now ready for prime time. This documentry will be aired on television and is also available to the general public as a video. Masks of Madness: Science of Healing chronicles the experiences of patients and health care profession als who went beyond the inadequacies of conventional psychitry to find their answers in or thomolecular medicine.
Hosted by actor Margot Kidder who herself suffered from manic depression, we hear how she finally recovered using orthomolecular medicine. Other former patients participate in a roundtable discussion of their individual descents into mental illness, their extraordinary difficulties in getting answers from conventional psychiatry, and their final recoveries using diet, vitamins and a minimum of pharmacological intervention.
Doctors and other health professionals recount their experiences as well. Abram Hoffer, Patrick Holford, Hugh Riordan, Hyla Cass, Bradford Weeks, Michael Janson and others recount for us their therapeutic methods, their professional satisfaction at seeing patients actually recover from the “incurable,” as well as the political dangers they faced when incorporating orthomolecular medicine into their psychiatric practices. The major orthomolecular building blocks to optimal mental health are introduced in an understandable way with the goal being to demonstrate that yes, orthomolecular medicine is a real answer for people suffering mental illness and physicians who long to make real changes in the lives of their patients. This is a documentary which everyone, including health professionals, will benefit from watching.Available from the International Schizophrenia Foundation for $30.75 which includes GST, Shipping and Handling

Available from the International Schizophrenia Foundation in DVD
or VHS format for: $30.75 (includes postage and handling)

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Synopsis
This book is a feast for the mind and the spirit: the autobiography of one of the great doctors of the 20th century, Dr. Abram Hoffer.  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. Based on the science of biochemistry, now known as orthomolecular medicine. 
Here we follow the journey of its founder: from his Saskatchewan farm childhood, subsequent training in bio-chemistry and agricultural science, his early insights into the central importance to human and animal health of soil and plant food quality, to his specialization in psychiatry, professorship at the University of Saskatchewan, and his daily work with patients. We learn of his disillusionment with traditional methods of treating the mentally ill 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 vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids and mental illness. 

Once teamed up with the great Linus Pauling, we re-live their research odysseys that led to modern orthomolecular medicine, transforming psychiatry, the treatment of cancer and chronic disease, and offering patients recovery, not merely death-watch maintenance therapies.  In addition to Dr. Hoffer’s many fruitful years working with Pauling, we also meet many colleagues who helped design the rigorous research programs for orthomolecular medicine. 
Finally, we read how Dr. Hoffer patiently and determinedly handled the attitude of medical authorities bent on preserving the status quo rather than focus on the suffering of patients.  Reading this book you will regain hope in both medicine and humanity.  Dr. Hoffer, now in his mid-eighties, still practices medicine in Victoria , BC .“When Drs Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond discovered, in the 1950s, that high doses of vitamins B3 and C were an excellent treatment for schizophrenia and that niacin lowered cholesterol, they were undermining the reigning  medical paradigms for psychiatry and cardiovascular disease.  However, their research has been consistently supported ever since. Vitamins not only treat deficiency diseases but, at high doses, they also prevent and cure other illnesses. Fathering a new paradigm does not promote popularity. Fortunately, Dr Hoffer is not justhighly intelligent, he has consistently proven to be able to stand up for the truth, regardless of personal cost. Look around you, there are health food stores everywhere  -  now thank Abram Hoffer for his courage.”

New book available:
Adventures in Psychiatry: The Scientific Memoirs of Dr. Abram Hoffer

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