Linus Pauling: I thought, this looked so important, this idea about changing the concentrations in the body of substances that are normally
present in the human body, that the field deserves a name. Perhaps what I thought really was, "I'm writing a paper about
this, what I've dug out of the literature, and what shall I call the paper?" So I decided to call it "orthomolecular psychiatry."
"Orthomolecular" meaning the right molecules in the right amounts. And the whole field of orthomolecular medicine, I would
say, is the achievement and preservation of good health and the treatment of disease by varying the concentrations in the
human body of substances that are normally present in the human body - many of them, in fact, required for life. Clearly
very important and powerful substances. And others not necessarily required for life, but still important. Perhaps manufactured
by the body itself.
As examples of orthomolecular medicine, recents ones, I might mention the control or treatment of tardive dyskinesia by having
the patient take ten grams of choline, per day....it's only reasonable that choline would be involved here, in this neurological
ailment caused by certain drugs, but because of its relation to acetylcholine.
Another example, Koutsias, who's dead now, wrote to me saying that he had read my paper, that he had tried treating Parkinson's
disease by giving the patients L-dopa, without any effect. And after he read my paper he went back and tried one-hundred
times as much L-dopa as he had tried before, and that was the beginning of the treatment of Parkinson's disease with L-dopa.
It was effective in these large amounts.
