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Source: Ted R – Professional Presentation – Date Unknown.mp3 File: ted-r-professional-presentation-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:14:24
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A further discussion is Dr. R.. I think somebody's been clamoring for Dr. R. to come up here and make a few comments. Dr. R.? Mr. Chairman, Abe and Bill W., wherever he's gone to, he's hiding up, I guess. I am always willing to travel halfway across the continent to hear Abe Hoffa talk because I always learn a great many things that I haven't been able to find in his writings. And I can't learn these things from anyone else. I think he is the best informed biochemist in the world in this particular field.
I came out here on a Greyhound bus. It took me 17 hours, and Abe knows that that's no fun. We could get no plane and no train, and my wife refused to ride in an automobile. Now, before I start my discussion, I want to read these words from the Bible because most of you, I will bet, will be buying this Bible before the year is over. It is called, How to Live with Schizophrenia. It is going to completely change the whole philosophy of schizophrenia in the psychiatric profession because up to now it's been a closed book.
You never told a patient he had such a diagnosis. Now they call me up and say, Doctor, I've got schizophrenia. Doctor Osman tells me I have. When can I see you? Now this is happening every day of my life now in New Jersey, so I'm going to quote from the Bible right back at Abe what he said before I say what I'm going to say. We hope the theories we discuss in this book will someday be markedly altered and new and better ones introduced. As this is the way of science, biochemists continually challenge each other for change.
Then I'm going to read the rest of the sentence that some of you may have a good smile with. In sharp contrast to the psychoanalysis whose greatest terror is that Freud might be proven wrong, that Bible is written by this gentleman that sits on my left. And let me tell you, it's a mighty good book. Sir, my congratulations to you and Humphrey. Now, a three gram per day dose for cholesterol will reduce cholesterol to normal level in a week, says Abe.
Now, isn't it true, Abe, though, that modest dosage will bring it down slowly and to advantage to many people? Not at all? You've got to give that much to bring the cholesterol down? No, there are a few cases that will come down on two. But I would say about 80% will have to have three. Before I do talk about them, I want to tell you about what started me in this game. I was responsible for bringing Abe to New Jersey the first time he came. Within less than two years, I think it was less than a year and a half, four other different organizations brought him to New Jersey, all within reach of my getting to hear him talk.
And by the time I had heard him four times in New Jersey and the first time in Chicago, and when I heard him the first time in Chicago, I said, that man I want to know more about. And I've been trying to learn more about him since. He's a bit obtuse, as you perhaps found out. He is scientific, he's hard to follow, but Freud was hard to follow too, and Freud left quite a trail behind him, quite a reputation. This man is going to leave one of the biggest reputations in biochemistry, I believe.
Now, I had a man who had been picked up, and he was on his way to, what's this place out in California that's a fancy place to go to for, like Greenbrier, but Palm Springs? Is Palm Springs in California? Huh?
[00:05:08]
Well, anyway, he was on his way out there and he got caught in three different places trying to convince different people at gas stands that his paranoid ideas should be listened to. And he really got in trouble, finally some cop picked him up and they took him into a hospital. But he got out of it because the boy has got dollars in his pocket and he can pretty well manage things. Now, when he was a young man, his father, this was long before AA had ever been discovered, or Bill W. had even thought about it, his father died in a Chicago hotel. He bled to death in front of this young man of a gastric hemorrhage.
Now, this had nothing to do, I'm sure, with the fact that he became a schizophrenia. I'm only telling you this as a part of the picture because he did become a schizophrenia that required commitment to a state hospital three different times. He was given various courses of electroshock up there. He finally came to me, called me on the phone, he says, won't some of these medicines help me? I said, just as a chance. This is five years before I've ever heard of you. This is true. He's the first one that ever got it. In 1959, he got it and this fellow who had been in all kinds of trouble with paranoia and so forth was a relatively quick recovery.
This is 1959. He is perfectly well today. He is one of Eisenhower's hard-working people-to-people workers. He goes out and works hard on church fund drives and gets a lot of money in. He's not a remarkable person. He's a relatively deteriorated schiz. And yet, niacin has kept him perfectly straight. The only other thing he gets is a 50 milligram of sparing at night. He's a perfectly complete and absolute recovery. I could name a few more, but I'm here primarily to talk about the cases that I think you have to watch out for because you're sooner or later going to run into one of them.
I've had three cases of bullous dermatosis. Bullous merely means a blister. A person may get blisters all over their body. One of these patients of mine had such a bad disorder that many people thought of the diagnosis of pemphigus and they thought they couldn't possibly save us. I'm sure both of you will agree that very few patients of pemphigus used to live before we had penicillin, but today I think most of them can be saved, but they're pretty sick people. They've got a dermatosis all over their body and there isn't much chance of their living, the same as there isn't if you get burns all over your body.
Well, this young lady developed this very acute disorder and was sent to a hospital and was there for two months. I never saw her. The niacin was discontinued as was everything else that she was taking, but fortunately for me, I'm not in the doghouse yet, but I might be still, the doctor who treated her told her he was sure it was due to one of the antihistamines. Antihistamines she'd been taking. I didn't know that antihistamines would cause bullous dermatosis, but this woman has today a generalized mottling of her skin and you know what I mean by mottling. It's irregular lines and they're wide lines, almost as big as this thing that's here, if I can just pull it off enough so you can see how wide it is.
It's over an inch and these black mottlings go all over her body, her legs, her arms, her chest, her neck. They don't show on her face, fortunately, and she's a pretty girl. She used to be an airplane hostess. Now, I say up to now I'm not in the doghouse. I can be tomorrow if somebody decides to pick this up and say it's niacin that did it. And if they do, I think she'll be back for treatment soon, but fortunately last month she came and asked if she could have a couple months off and I said sure, I think that's a good idea, but I'm just figuring that sooner or later somebody's going to say this was caused by niacin.
Because I've got these other two cases that were not as bad, but they both were serious. One woman first started with edema in the ankles and then she got blisters on her legs, some on her arms, and the other case very similar. Both of them got the edema first. Well, of course, the niacin is stopped and they put on diaryl or hydrodiaryl, one or the other, and usually the edema will clear up overnight, but the bullish rash doesn't always clear up that quick.
[00:10:00]
It may last, say, two weeks, and I think fortunately for us we now have something that I believe will probably antidote this and prevent it in a good many cases and perhaps be to some extent curative, as I said to a doctor that's sitting in the audience here this afternoon. This is periactin. I stumbled onto this. The man that died about two weeks ago, three weeks ago, Wayne Woolley, a blind scientist in New York, had suggested the use of this as a partial aid to us in using serotonin in depressions, that is using 5-hydroxytryptophan, which is the precursor of serotonin, and we found it was useless for that purpose.
He gave us the idea that this would perhaps replace basal analog of serotonin, which we can't get. We may be able to get it sooner or later. But at the same time that this was happening, I was treating all these other cases, and I said, well, for the Lord's sakes, when we get these things, when we get these flushes, we've tried everything, we haven't found anything yet that will help them. So we started using this, and now I use it in every single case, and I don't think it fails in more than one or two percent. It may be three percent.
But anybody that gets the flushing, if you will take this immediately, and I found this out myself in the past two weeks, because I started niacin myself two weeks ago, and I'll start with a little burning in my ear, and then it'll come down to the lobe, and I know darn well the next thing will be my lips, and if you take one of these tablets, it'll disappear in less than two or three minutes. And they're a very simple thing. They don't cost much. It's a four milligram tablet put out by Merck Shop and Dome. Very active. But this is the main thing that I want to leave with you. I can't agree with Abe's statement, there is no harm whatever in taking this chemical.
I think you can do some harm by the massive doses, as Dr. Bennett has pointed out, but my feeling is this. This is a calculated risk. You hear this used all the time today. It used to be that you couldn't use this. I mean, that calculated risk of forest oil going out of the window I don't think was a necessary one. I think he should have been treated as any other depressed case. At that time, the only thing we knew was electroshock, and the person who'd been his consultant made a statement to that effect at the time. But other calculated risks are here. Schizophrenia is the most serious medical disease known to mankind. Much more serious than cancer. Cancer gets an awful lot more time.
Aren't there more cases of schizophrenia extent today walking the streets or in hospitals than there are cases of cancer? I will bet you that there are probably near a third more, maybe twice more. Now the point is, we're dealing with a disease that is serious, that means a living death for some people if they don't get the right treatment, and some of them. I'm not getting as good figures as Abe is getting, but I tell you the cases that you see recover like this man I've just told you.
He drives around in a nice bright red Stingray, what's the Chevrolet, fancy car. He's doing a lot of good in his community. And up to 1959 he was amounting to absolutely nothing, and Niacin alone has done it. And I can tell you of a number of other cases. Now I can't give you the statistics that you'd like to have with regard to alcoholics at this stage of the game, but certainly I shall go to work on them, as many of your doctors in this group are already doing, and I certainly hope a year from now I'll have more to report on this. Thank you.
Thank you, Dr. R.. I'm sure you had a very attentive audience, particularly in talking about the man with the blisters, because if any group has been blistered before, this group certainly qualifies. I think you've got a greater percentage of people who have been blistered in this group than any place.