Abram Hoffer Memorial Lecture
Presenter: L. John Hoffer, MD, PhD
Orthomolecular medicine is the restoration and maintenance of health through the administration of optimal amounts of substances normally present in the body. In practice, it involves the administration of certain nutritional supplements and the consumption and avoidance of certain nutrients as guided by a person’s disease, genotype and biochemical phenotype.
Scientific views have recently been evolving, but it remains true that, in general, medical orthodoxy disdains orthomolecular medicine either as a trivial assertion of the obvious – hence irrelevant – or when not trivial, as disproven. The validity of this conclusion is undermined by academic medicine’s well-documented nutritional illiteracy and anti-nutrition bias. Conferences like this one aim to inform, educate and unite scientifically-minded people interested in applying sound nutritional and biochemical principles to disease prevention and amelioration. But there is now another complication: burgeoning science cynicism. How can orthomolecular medicine improve its scientific credibility in an era of growing scientific misinformation, confusion, and cynicism? This presentation provides some conceptual channels through the ice floe of academic disregard of nutrition and widespread popular ignorance, bias, misinformation and cynicism about science in general and orthomolecular medicine in particular.
