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History

Jack Dreyfus

The Dreyfus Health Foundation began over 35 years ago as the Dreyfus Medical Foundation. Jack Dreyfus, founder of Dreyfus & Co. and the Dreyfus Fund, established the Foundation after treatment with phenytoin (PHT), known also by the brand-name Dilantin, led to his recovery from an endogenous depression. Finding that the uses of PHT were not widely known, he started the Foundation to study, collect, and disseminate information and sponsor collaborative, clinical, and basic health research on its benefits.

PHT was first synthesized in the early 1900s by a German chemist. It was introduced into clinical practice in the United States in 1937 as the first non-sedative treatment for epilepsy. PHT has been reported useful for more than 70 symptoms and disorders, including depression, anxiety, mania, repetitive thinking, various types of pain, cardiac arrhythmias, neuromuscular disorders, impulsive aggression, cocaine abuse and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as burns, wound and skin ulcer healing. The broader use of PHT, where medically indicated and in the best interests of patients, is important because it can be used in many places where other, often more expensive medications are not available.

Since 1970, Jack Dreyfus has published four bibliographies summarizing and analyzing the medical literature on the uses of PHT and has distributed them to physicians worldwide. These bibliographies derived from the Foundation's library, which now contains over 18,000 papers on PHT. In addition to the bibliography, The Broad Range of Clinical Use of Phenytoin, Jack Dreyfus has published several books on PHT, including A Remarkable Medicine Has Been Overlooked, The Lion of Wall Street, The Story of a Remarkable Medicine, and Written in Frustration.

The worldwide study and findings of PHT’s many uses confirms its role as an example of an inexpensive and available resource that is not being used to its full potential. In addition, these findings contribute to the increasing evidence that many efforts to improve health are failing because available resources, in general, are not being used optimally. PHT gave rise to the Foundation’s Problem Solving for Better Health^® (PSBH^®) methodology, which emphasizes using available resources to solve health problems, rather than waiting for solutions from the outside. PSBH was designed to give people, perhaps the most important of available resources, the confidence to unleash their innate abilities to problem solve.

The PSBH program was established in 1988 after the Dreyfus Medical Foundation became the Dreyfus Health Foundation (DHF) and joined The Rogosin Institute, a major United States medical research and health care facility. Officially launched in 1989 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, PSBH has been implemented in over 30 countries around the world.