Megavitamin Therapy

Megavitamin therapy is the use of large doses of vitamins, often many times greater than the recommended dietary allowance, in an attempt to prevent or treat disease. It is typically used in alternative medicine by practitioners who call their approach orthomolecular medicine. Vitamins are useful for preventing and treating illnesses specifically tied to dietary vitamin shortfalls, but the broad disease treatment claims made by megavitamin therapy's advocates are unsubstantiated by available medical research, and doses greatly in excess of nutritional requirements generally result either in toxicity or in the excess being simply metabolized.