ARE YOU A FRIEND OF BILL W.?

Bill recognized and later promoted the view that orthomolecular treatment was essential for the treatment of those addicted to alcohol. When Dr. Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D. discovered in Saskatchewan that Niacin (vitamin B3) was therapeutic for schizophrenia, including the 10 percent of the schizophrenic population that was also addicted to alcohol, Bill was persuaded to study the effect of vitamin B3 on members of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York, who were not drinking, were not schizophrenic, yet remained very tense, restless, depressed and tired. He found that, out of a series of 30 patients, 20 were relieved of all these symptoms in about two months.
 Bill Wilson distributed this information to members of AA in a series of three Communications to Alcoholics Anonymous. These publications generated a lot of controversy from the International Board, which Wilson had created, down to local AA groups. The main opposition came from the medical members of that group, who believed that no layperson such as Wilson had the right to talk about the medical matters of alcoholism (i.e. the use of vitamin B3). This comment, coming from conventional medical doctors, astonishes me; not one nutrition course was required for a medical degree in the 1940s and their attitude certainly displays a lack of supplemental training in nutrition and nutritional sciences. Even today conventional medical doctors remain predominately clueless themselves as to the function and use of vitamins, minerals, EFAs and amino acids in the human body Today an average of 8 - 12 hours of nutritional education is offered to medical students in some schools - this still does not qualify them to be authorities in any capacity regarding nutrition or nutritional supplementation. Apparently, for the AA physicians of the time, MD stood for Medical Divinity and Bill's findings and requests for further study were dismissed simply because he didn't have a degree in medicine, which would not have better qualified him anyway, nor did it qualify the physicians to dismiss the positive results and stop further investigation of something that was actually helping alcoholics get sober and feel better. Bill was eventually forced to do his work outside the International Board. Bill did just that and his findings were corroborated by Dr. David Hawkins and by Dr. Russell Smith in publications of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.

Bill W.
Niacin Therapy!
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