By Dr. George Goodheart

Summary: In spite of nearly a century of medical investigation, schizophrenia remains a baffling disease in both its cause and treatment. While pharmaceutical drugs have long been the backbone of conventional therapy, such drugs tend to simply mitigate symptoms of the illness while often inducing severe side effects. In this fascinating article from 1970, acclaimed chiropractor and nutritionist Dr. George Goodheart—the father of Applied Kinesiology—presents an alternative therapy for the disease that combines upper spinal adjustments with dietary supplementation with niacin and/or niacinamide (aka “vitamin B₃”). In a wide-ranging discussion, Dr. Goodheart details the characteristic responses of schizophrenics to muscle testing along with the origins of the “adrenochrome hypothesis” of schizophrenia, which proposes that the disease is caused by psychopathological metabolites of adrenaline that are degraded in normal individuals but remain unmetabolized in schizophrenics (and can be broken down by niacin). While medicine currently discredits the adrenochome hypothesis, over the years many healthcare professionals—both alternative and conventional—have reported positive results in treating schizophrenia with niacin, suggesting that while the mechanism originally proposed by adrenochrome hypothesis may not be entirely accurate, the therapy suggested by the theory is effective nevertheless. From The Digest of Chiropractic Economics, 1970.