PanAmerican University of Natural Medicine & Sciences

Orthomolecular nutrition aims to maintain human health through specific nutritional supplementation. The concept recognizes that due to heredity or chronic stress factors, certain individuals have vitamin/nutrient dependent disorders. The practice builds on the idea of an optimum nutritional environment in the body and suggests that diseases reflect deficiencies in this environment. Treatment for disease, according to this view, involves attempts to correct "imbalances or deficiencies based on individual biochemistry" by use of substances such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, trace elements, fatty acids or even specific botanical substances. The findings behind orthomolecular medicine are supported by clinical and sound medical evidence and the therapy but has been ignored and even supressed. The validity of the orthomolecular approach as a form of medicine has been questioned since the 1970s in spite of its widespread use.

For example, the use of high dose vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, was approached with radical scepticism in the 1970s only to find today orthodoxy has caved based on hard and sound clinical evidence. Now, blood vitamin D levels for a routine lab test is accepted by primary care doctors. Old school medicals doctors from those times can only say "I told you so.!" We acknowledge, the same will occur for such compounds as vitamin C, thiamine, niacin, etc.

The approach is sometimes referred to as megavitamin therapy because its practice evolved out of, and in some cases still uses, doses of vitamins and minerals many times higher than the recommended dietary intake. Orthomolecular practitioners may also incorporate a variety of other styles of treatment into their approaches, including dietary restriction, allergic food avoidance, megadoses of non-vitamin nutrients and even some pharmaceutical drugs like metformin and methylene blue.  Othomolecular doctors have long argued that non-optimal levels and hereditary deficiency diseases of certain substances can cause health issues beyond simple vitamin deficiency and see balancing these substances as an integral part of health in such diseases as schizophrenia, epilepsy, subclinical scurvies, and even cancer. There are a host of illnesses that have been routinely cured by megadose vitamin therapy. 

Linus Pauling coined the term "orthomolecular" in the 1960s to mean "the right molecules in the right amounts" (ortho- in Greek implies "correct"). Practitioners of orthomolecular medicine hold that treatment must be based on each patient's individual biochemistry and therefore use sound means of diagnosis with laboratory back tests and data. Practitioners also realize that orthomolecular treatment is essentially a cheap method of treatment that does not necessarily profit big pharma. 

This 25 Clock Hour course is a combination of written Lessons and audio lectures.

INTRODUCTORY VIDEO: DR. LINUS PAULING, FATHER OF ORTHOMOLECULAR NUTRITION, CRUSADING SCIENTIST