Your doctor is not your friend

So, it seems simple, doesn't it? You take your vitamin and mineral supplements, and within a few weeks or a few months you are back to normal.

There are many complicating factors preventing what I thought was supposed to be a fairly straightforward thing. Chris has been taking his supplements now for four years. He definitely seems more normal, but he is still not paying income tax and neither does he seem interested in making this a goal.

If Dr. Hoffer was as successful as he was in treating patients, now fifty years on, why is schizophrenia still viewed as "chronic"? Or, more personally, why aren't you well?

I will throw out three ideas. One is your doctor. Two is you. Three is the competition. These will be discussed in separate posts. I'll begin with your doctor.

Your doctor probably doesn't believe in vitamins and may do everything he or she can to undermine your desire to introduce these into your personally designed program of total health.

Chris's psychiatrist was one such person. To be fair, the psychiatrist was part of the institution in which Chris was enrolled as a day patient. So, it wasn't necessarily the doctor who disapproved of vitamins. It was the institution that saw it as a threat to its way of doing business. The institution has a program to help young people in their twenties reintegrate back into society by giving them a focus for their day, therapeutic activities and medications. Recreational drugs were forbidden (rightly so) for those enrolled in the program but medications were not just encouraged, they were mandatory.

When naive me let the doctors know that Chris was taking vitamins, at first they said this was fine with them. They said the usual stuff like "vitamins aren't proven useful, but they are not really harmful either." When I began to notice improvements in Chris (usually I noticed the improvements - the doctors did not) I asked that Chris's medications be lowered. The stage was set for conflict. If Chris had a problem with incontinence, for example, I blamed it on the medications being too high, they blamed it on the vitamins. If Chris was more out of it than usual, the doctors said his medication needed to be raised or even changed. To this I countered, "well, since he's on medications, why is this even happening?" So then they would earnestly talk about damaged brains and the need for medications to protect the brain from further deterioration. I'm sure you have seen pictures of the damaged schizophrenic brain. It looks like a blue bicyle helmet that has had pink paint dumped on it.

One of the hardest parts of all this is having a spouse/family member who disagrees with your approach, or who may be supportive but is understandably worried about being wrong. None of us operates in a vacuum. This makes unilateral action on using vitamins challenging. The doctors and pharmaceutical companies exploit this, believe me, by terrorizing us about the damaged brain.

So, we try to work with vitamins in a climate of fear. It would have been wonderful if Chris were never on medications and if he had started on vitamins as soon as we thought something was wrong. But we didn't know about vitamins or schizophrenia at the time, and we believed the doctors when they told us that medications were not only effective, but necessary in treating schizophrenia.

There is tyranny in the vitamin approach, too. I'll save my comments on this for another day.