"ADHD is not a disease; it is a nutritional deficiency."

—Lendon H. Smith

The man who would become nationally known as "The Children's Doctor" received his M.D. in 1946 from the University of Oregon Medical School. He served as Captain in the U. S. Army Medical Corps from 1947-1949, went on to a pediatric residency at St. Louis Children's Hospital, and completed it at Portland's Doernbecker Memorial Hospital in 1951. In 1955, Smith became Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Oregon Medical Hospital. He would practice pediatrics for 35 years before retiring in 1987 to lecture, to write, and to continue to help make "megavitamin" a household word. And yet it was not until over 20 years of medical practice that Dr. Smith first began to use megavitamin therapy. It is a remarkable transformation. As he learned about nutritional prevention and megavitamin therapy, he began to discuss it. In Feed Your Kids Right (1979), Smith recommends up to 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C during illness. In Foods for Healthy Kids (1981), he now recommends bowel tolerance levels of ascorbate. These are long evolutionary steps for a pediatrician who, 22 years earlier, wrote of vitamin C: "Excess is a waste and will not prevent colds." (The Children's Doctor, p. 217) Had he held to such politically safe beliefs, Smith might have avoided being compelled to stop practicing medicine in 1987, under pressure from insurance companies and his state's Board of Medical Examiners. Nonetheless, for fourteen more years, he would speak out in favour of megavitamin therapy. In this, he did the job second to none. He appeared on The Tonight Show sixty-two times, an exposure such as orthomolecular medicine has rarely seen. Even Dr. Pauling never won an Emmy award. Dr. Smith did.

—From: Saul AW. In Memoriam: Lendon H. Smith, M.D. J Orthomol Med 2000, Vol 16, No 4, p 248-250.