H3 Book Index:: Chapters 1-29
We have seen that there has been no miracle drug discovered at Bucharest, that "H3" is merely a new name for something not fully understood about a very old and familiar drug-procaine hydrochloride. We have seen further that other doctors used procaine before (sometimes long before) Prof. AsIan, to treat exactly the same stress diseases. We have learned that there is still no sure answer to the riddle of how (or to what extent) procaine works in the human body, and we see that thus far there is no positive indication that procaine can postpone the normal onset of old age. Then why all the excitement?
Because while others have applied procaine in the relief of one or another stress diseases (and stopped if the treatment was not promptly successful or as soon as somesymptomatic relief was obtained), Prof. Aslan saw old age as a complex of these same stress diseases, and procaine as a potential weapon in the battle against old age itself.
Her reports that procaine is effective not merely as a therapy against one or another disease, but against the debility, the helplessness, the childishness and the senility of old age, are tremendously exciting to the entire world, for old age strikes every man and woman who survives maturity.
In the United States alone, there are today more than fifteen million persons above the age of sixty-five. By the end of this century, this group may number close to thirty million. These figures point up the scope of a great national problem, for while aging may still be considered a crisis for the individual, it is today the concern of the community as a whole.
So far, our main emphasis has been on improvement of the care for the elderly. Up to now, medical science has failed to come to grips with the task of treating old age. Nobody is more intimately aware of this situation than are those physicians who deal mostly with old people.
Says Dr. Edward J. Stieglitz of Washington, D.C.: "Health is a lot more than the absence of disease. Pediatrics has been making healthy children healthier. Geriatrics could do the same. The trouble is that doctors think entirely in terms of disease, and are ignoring their opportunities for making aging people healthier." This is the opportunity which was not ignored by Prof Aslan-the opportunity to search for a therapy which would make aging people healthier.
It has been remarked that with old age the good characteristics of man diminish, while the bad ones increase. It is this very manifestation which tends to
make old people valueless, superfluous, expendable. By the same token, it makes them a burden to the younger generation, individually as well as collectively.
"Most of us are likely to feel almost instinctively that youth is everything and that old age is a disaster", Dr. Michael M. Dacso, once director of physical medicine and rehabilitation at N ew York's Goldwater Memorial Hospital, stated. "We pity old people. Often we avoid them. Sometimes we laugh at them." To our current way of thinking, as psychiatrist Dr. Jack Weinberg of Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital has so aptly put it, the aged are "simply people without a future." Or, as Prof. Eisfelder said so succinctly, "the question is whether we will merely create a larger pool of superfluous human beings out of our older citizens or integrate everyone into the total society." Obviously, this can only be done when more research money for the health problems of our aging population becomes available. "The total budget for extramural aging research in the United States in fiscal 1972 was two and a half million dollars," says Eisfelder. "That was not enough to continue the research already funded, and it meant that out of every hundred grants on research in aging, only one was being supported with federal money."
While some improvement in this field has taken place during the last five years, the small amounts spent on aging research must be seen in relation to the hundreds of millions expended year after year for cancer research-yet many more people" age" than develop cancer. The aged, in spite of the strides made in recent years, have remained medicine's stepchildren.
The attitude of defeatism which has been characteristic of so much of the world's effort on behalf of the elderly may be changed through the application of the procaine therapy if it will prove as effective as Ana Aslan and the other researchers believe on the basis oftheir findings we have detailed on these pages. For this is the first proposal for a treatment for old age which could be used on a broad scale because it is simple to administer, inexpensive, and not habit forming.
Why then, considering the many positive reports by American scientists, the foot-dragging by the FDA? Why the opposition of so much of the medical establishment? Is it that what is accessible to the elderly in some eighty countries df the world, is not good enough for America's aging? We are awaiting the answers for we feel that with the procaine therapy available, the battle against old age has been joined!
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H3 Book Index:: Chapters 1-29
