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CHAPTER 16

Antioxidants

Vitamin E

A few years ago, a visiting speaker at our weekly departmental presentation praised the virtues of
vitamin E as a potential treatment for several neurologic and psychiatric disorders, and as a general
antiaging therapy. At the end of his talk, Dr. Jack Gorman, one of my colleagues who likes to occupy
the front row, rose to his full height of six feet three inches and asked the speaker how much vitamin
E he took daily. The speaker turned the question around and asked Jack how much he took daily.
Jack immediately replied, “Four hundred international units.”Jack is certainly not alone in this; many
physicians, including yours truly, ingest a vitamin E capsule daily. In fact, the average daily dose of
vitamin E has likely risen from 400 to 800 international units (IUs) daily among physicians, attesting
to their growing faith in the antiaging properties of vitamin E.

Physicians Who Take Vitamin E

Doctors are notoriously bad patients, but they are often ahead of the curve when it comes to
preserving their own health, as many are now doing with vitamin E. Remember how common it was
for doctors to smoke in the 1950s and 1960s? At that time, many doctors were regular smokers in the
United States, with even higher numbers in most other countries. But once the findings emerged on
the links between smoking and both lung cancer and heart disease, many doctors quit
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