Trial & Error

Reflecting the trial-&-error nature of their profession, doctors last week praised sky-high one new drug, damned another which until lately they had praised skyhigh, found a new use for a third.

Benzedrine is a synthetic colorless liquid, chemically related to adrenalin. Smith, Kline & French Laboratories of Philadelphia have a patent on the drug until 1950. Benzedrine is ordinarily used as a nasal spray or inhalant to reduce congestion due to head colds, sinusitis, rhinitis, hay fever, asthma. Larger doses of the drug cause restlessness, sleeplessness.

Restlessness and sleeplessness being precisely what doctors try to attain in treating cases of mid-day drowsiness, called narcolepsy, a few doctors tried benzedrine solutions as remedy, found that narcoleptics became not only alert, but cheerful and energetic.

As a result of his experiments, Professor Abraham Myerson of Tufts College Medical School (Boston) last week was able to advise members of the American Psychological Association, meeting at Dartmouth College, to prescribe benzedrine to gloomy, anhedonic individuals who contemplate suicide. On them the drug has a "very remarkable influence." Benzedrine also has "very interesting and favorable results in a good many of those normal and quasi-normal [such as hangover] states where the individual has not had sufficient rest or is depressed in the morning."

Cinchophen is a bitter white powder discovered in 1887 and used since 1908 as a treatment for gout, arthritis, rheumatic fever, neuralgia, neuritis, sciatica. By 1932 U. S. invalids were annually using 90,000 Ib. of cinchophen and its derivatives.

By 1932 many U. S. doctors felt sure that cinchophen was primarily responsible for many deaths directly due to yellow atrophy of the liver. This matter was thrashed out last May during the convention of the American Medical Association. There Drs. Walter Lincoln Palmer and Paul Silas Woodall presented conclusive evidence that, although cinchophen does not poison all users, there is no way of telling whose liver it may attack or when it begins its deadly work. Said their report, released last week: "The very earliest symptoms may be only a signal, already too late, that the steady march of death has begun. . . . There is no safe 'method for the administration of cinchophen. . . . Cinchophen is a dangerous drug."

Benzoate, On the premises i) that constipation causes arthritis and 2) that the calcium double salt of benzyl succinic and benzoic acids eliminates intestinal toxins from the system, Herman Seydel, Jersey City manufacturing chemist, this week argued before the American Chemical Society in Pittsburgh that this bitter benzoate cures arthritis.

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