Dr. Bonnie Camo is Interviewed by Alan V. Schmukler

Dr. Bonnie Camo grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, site of the first homeopathic school in America. She started her MD at Hahnemann Medical college in 1974.  She subsequently went to work at the Princeton Brain Bio Center under Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, practicing Orthomolecular Psychiatry, treating mental illness with nutrition instead of drugs. She later studied and became highly skilled in homeopathy and set up her practice. She is the author of Natural Medicine: For a Healthy Mind and Body.

A.S.  Before taking up homeopathy you were working with Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, practicing orthomolecular medicine at the Princeton Brain Bio Center.  Can you tell us about that experience? Who were your patients?  How did they fare?           

B.C. The term orthomolecular psychiatry was coined by Linus Pauling (winner of two Nobel prizes, for chemistry and peace) in his famous article in Science magazine in 1968.  It refers to the treatment of mental illness with substances that occur naturally in the human body, such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fatty acids.

The brain is dependent on nutrients supplied by the body.  If these are inadequate due to a poor diet (deficiency) or a genetic need for more than the usual amount of a particular nutrient (dependency), the brain may be unable to function normally. Psychiatric diagnostic labels are not based on the cause of the problem, but merely on a catalog of symptoms, as listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the Bible of psychiatry.

Orthomolecular psychiatry attempts to determine the biochemical cause of the brain malfunction and treat it with the appropriate nutrients.

I began working at the Princeton Brain Bio Center in 1979, under Dr Carl Pfeiffer.  According to his research at the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute in the 1970’s, the majority of schizophrenics suffer from a deficiency of the brain neurotransmitter histamine, a condition he named “histapenia”.  Histamine is released from white blood cells called basophils in response to allergens.  As a neurotransmitter, it may control other neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin.

Dr. Pfeiffer discovered how to treat schizophrenia with vitamin B12, folic acid, and niacin, which raise histamine.  He found that many patients had excessive copper, which lowers histamine.  At the Brain BioCenter, we used zinc and vitamin C to remove excess copper, as well as heavy metals like lead, cadmium and mercury.

Dr. Pfeiffer’s research showed that about ten percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia actually had the opposite condition, too much histamine, which he called “histadelia”. These people would probably be diagnosed today as bipolar or schizoaffective.

High histamine is generally associated with conditions like chronic depression, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, chronic alcoholism, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as allergic conditions.  Histadelia was treated with methionine, an amino acid, which detoxifies histamine by methylation.  SAMe, a new and effective treatment for depression (as well as arthritis) is a derivative of methionine.

Pfeiffer found that many schizophrenics and some normal people under stress have pyrolles in their urine, which combine with zinc and vitamin B6, causing these nutrients to be lost in the urine, a condition known as “pyroluria”.

This type of schizophrenia tends to run in families and can be precipitated by stress.  Common symptoms include changes in sensory perception (disperceptions), intolerance to some protein foods, alcohol, or drugs, morning nausea, lack of dream recall, white spots on fingernails, stretch marks, inability to tan, irregular periods, abdominal pain and constipation.  Any of these may be worsened by stress.  Pyroluria quickly responds to high doses of vitamin B6 and zinc.

My patients were mostly people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or other mental illness, who were usually on medications that weren’t helping and wanted to try something different. Most of them did very well and many could get off drugs or reduce their dose.

We advised them on a healthy diet and recommended nutritional supplements based on blood and urine tests for histamine, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, toxic heavy metals, allergies, etc.

The PBC was associated with an institution called Earth House, which was started by Rosalind La Roach, who had been cured of schizophrenia by Dr Pfeiffer.  Patients were referred to as students and stayed there as long as necessary, eating healthy organic food and nutrients prescribed by me or another PBC doctor, doing yoga and getting exercise.  Eventually the state of New Jersey required them to also be seen by a psychiatrist and they were prescribed psych drugs, so the holistic food and nutrients didn’t work as well.

The first neuroleptic tranquilizer, Thorazine™, was introduced to North America in 1953, and promoted aggressively by psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies.  These antipsychotic drugs work by blocking dopamine, known as the brain’s pleasure chemical.

Dopamine in the cerebral cortex allows you to make connections, solve puzzles, and form a whole picture from incomplete data.  In excess, it could make everything fit together too well, producing paranoia, where the whole world is conspiring against you. (But remember, just because you’reparanoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.)

Blocked dopamine synapses become hypersensitive, so when the drug is withdrawn, paranoia and hallucinations become worse than ever.  Once the patient is on orthomolecular therapy, an attempt can be made to withdraw the drugs very gradually.

 A.S.  The orthomolecular approach to psychiatric illness was clearly superior to shock treatment and toxic drugs. Why didn’t it ever become mainstream medicine?

B.C.   Why don’t doctors use orthomolecular treatments?   Orthomolecular medicine is a method of treatment using natural substances including vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, based on testing for nutritional deficiencies and toxicities, rather than using pharmaceuticals.

I practiced this with Dr Carl Pfeiffer at the Princeton BioCenter in the 1980s and ‘90s.  Medical students are not taught anything about nutrition, only about patented drugs, which don’t get to the root of the problem, but only suppress symptoms. They are taught that nothing can be cured, except perhaps infectious diseases treated with antibiotics, and that medicine is about controlling symptoms with drugs.

I feel very sorry for idealistic young people today who enter medical school hoping to learn how to cure people of diseases and illnesses. Medical school education is     totally controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, which has no interest in health or curing illness, only in what is profitable.

Why didn’t conventional medicine follow up on Orthomolecular principles? It is because their purpose is not to cure people. It is to make as much profit as possible for the shareholders in their corporations. In 1900, homeopathy was the leading alternative therapy in the US, with 22 homeopathic medical schools, including Boston University, University of Michigan, Ohio State, University of Minnesota, University of Iowa and New York Medical College, which at the time was called New York Homeopathic Medical College.

In the late 19th century, John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the world. He started Standard Oil Corporation in 1870, which soon came under fire. In 1911, Standard Oil was ruled an unreasonable monopoly and split into 34 companies, which became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Marathon and others.

To improve his image and exert more world control, Rockefeller got into philanthropy, allowing him to avoid taxation and put money into society in ways that would benefit his businesses. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, allowing him to set the research agenda to further his own interests.

He set up the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. Around the same time, Andrew Carnegie, who was in the steel industry, also became very wealthy and set up a foundation.  According to Jacob Nordangard, Ph.D. a Swedish researcher and author:  “The idea was to have this money and make it work for … a new order of     the world and that was meant to be built on management philosophy, because they thought that the government of the day was not efficient     — it was inefficient.”

Meanwhile, at the time, Rockefeller still had an image problem. The Foundation he created under his name was deemed “a menace to the future political and economic welfare of the nation.”  The Foundation, in partnership with Andrew Carnegie and educator Abraham Flexner, then set out to centralize U.S. medical schooling,     orienting it to the “germ theory” of disease, which states that germs are solely responsible for disease and require the use of pharmaceuticals to target these germs.

Rockefeller financed the campaign to consolidate mainstream medicine, adopt the philosophies of the growing pharmaceutical industry and wipe out its competition.          His crusade caused the closure of more than half of U.S. medical schools, promoted public and press scorn for homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, nutritional, holistic, functional, integrative and natural medicines, and led to the incarceration of many practicing physicians.

In 1910 the Carnegie Foundation (in secret collaboration with the AMA.) published the Flexner Report, “Medical Education in America” with the aim of replacing natural medicines, such as herbs and homeopathy, with synthetic chemical drugs. Rockefeller and Carnegie funded medical schools all over America on the strict condition that they teach only allopathic medicine. (They were unaware that the word allopathic, meaning ‘other suffering’ was coined by     Hahnemann in derision of the “old school” doctors whose drugs caused new symptoms and side effects.)

They reorganized the curricula of these medical schools, removing any mention of the healing power of herbs or natural treatments.  From “Rockefeller Medicine Men” by E Richard Brown:

“The key principles behind Rockefeller’s drug business plan:

1. The products must be patentable.
2. The products should not address the root causes of disease, but only treat the symptoms.
3. The products should have addictive potential.

This is still their business model today.”   According to Dana Ullman, doctors commonly assert that they practice “scientific medicine,” and patients think that the medical treatments they receive are “scientifically proven.” However, this ideal is a     dream, not reality, and a clever and profitable marketing ruse, not fact.

I recently read two of Robert Whitaker’s books, Mad in America, and Anatomy of an Epidemic, which describe how psychiatric drugs cause or aggravate the very brain disorders they are alleged to cure. If you have any trust remaining in the current medical model, the events of the last 3 years will help you understand that its very foundation is based upon greed, profit and societal control.

Consider “financially-incentivized hospital death protocols” via ventilators.     Medicare paid hospitals $13,000 per each person who was admitted as a COVID     case, and another $39,000 for every patient put on a ventilator, most of whom died.

Covid vaccines are neither safe nor effective.  They killed millions of people by weird blood clots, heart inflammation, destroying the immune system and natural immunity, and many other unnatural disorders.  Vaccinated people are over 2X more likely to get COVID than the unvaccinated. Whoops!  Steve Kirsch’s newsletter    [email protected].

While vaccine makers undoubtedly want to protect their profit scheme, greed is not the sole reason for hiding vaccine harms and launching a massive attack on “antivaxxers.” Health authorities know they’ve permanently damaged public health, but they can’t let that truth be known, or else no one will ever trust them again.

Del Bigtree on The Highwire, plays a clip of Heidi Larson, an anthropologist who served on the World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy, in December 2019, the purpose of which was to figure out how to stop vaccine hesitancy.

Her comment is quite revealing: “We’re in a unique position in human history, where we’ve shifted the human population to … dependency on vaccine-induced immunity. And that’s on the great assumption that populations would cooperate.          And for many years, people lined up … We’re in a very fragile state.  Now, we have developed a world that is dependent on vaccinations, we don’t have a choice but to make that effort.”

Here is a quote by Aldous Huxley on medical science: “Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.”  One benefit of the loss of trust in the covid vaccines is that people have also started to lose faith in the regular vaccines that children in many states are forced to take just to attend school, and renewed suspicion (obvious to some of us) that there may be a connection between vaccines and autism.  As people believe less and less in conventional medicine, they may eventually turn to homeopathy.  We should be ready!

A.S.   Thank you Dr. Camo for sharing with us today!