Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame
Inducted 2004Dr. Alan Cott fasted psychiatric patients while an attending physician at Gracie Square Hospital in New York City. In so doing, Lendon Smith, MD, writes that Dr. Cott was following the work of Dr. Yuri “Nicolayev of Moscow, who has fasted more than 10,000 mentally ill patients… The manic phase of manic depressive illness can be brought under control in the first week of a fast. Cott made them exercise by taking long walks. They drank two quarts of water every day as a minimum. If a patient failed to drink this amount, he terminated the fast… By the end of the first week, the medicines they had been on were usually discontinued.”
In addition to two popular books on supervised fasting, Dr. Cott wrote Dr. Cott’s Help for Your Learning Disabled Child: The Orthomolecular Treatment and was a frequent contributor to the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry. His papers on Controlled Fasting Treatment for Schizophrenia and the Orthomolecular Approach to the Treatment of Learning Disabilities were presented at the Nutrition and Mental Health Hearing before the Select Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in 1977.
