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Mental Breakdown and Pellagra from Low Protein Diet
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 7:59 AM
Osteopathic Women’s Association of California 1955.
Excerpt from Lectures of Dr. Royal Lee, Vol II
It is a low protein diet that’s the finest way to bring on a mental condition and I think that’s a part of our pellagra syndrome (systemic disease caused by a severe deficiency of niacin). It’s the Vitamin G Complex deficiency plus the low protein diet. Then the patient winds up in the insane asylum flush with the pellagral lesions.
I was quite interested to find that one of our books on pellagra, the statement that a patient had developed mental symptoms of pellagra without any other physical symptoms. In other words, she could go off the beam from pellagra alone and not show any skin lesions. Who’s going to diagnose it as pellagra under those circumstances?
That’s kind of a pitiful situation here. We have so many thousands of people in insane asylums and nobody is looking at them with a critical eye to wonder if they’re not starving to death.
Excerpt from Lectures of Dr. Royal Lee, Vol II
It is a low protein diet that’s the finest way to bring on a mental condition and I think that’s a part of our pellagra syndrome (systemic disease caused by a severe deficiency of niacin). It’s the Vitamin G Complex deficiency plus the low protein diet. Then the patient winds up in the insane asylum flush with the pellagral lesions.
I was quite interested to find that one of our books on pellagra, the statement that a patient had developed mental symptoms of pellagra without any other physical symptoms. In other words, she could go off the beam from pellagra alone and not show any skin lesions. Who’s going to diagnose it as pellagra under those circumstances?
That’s kind of a pitiful situation here. We have so many thousands of people in insane asylums and nobody is looking at them with a critical eye to wonder if they’re not starving to death.