The Vegetative Life

Dr. Peter J. Steincrohn of Hartford, Conn, wrote You Don't Have to Exercise to prove that exercise after 40 is definitely harmful; his rule for fitness from then on is to stay thin and lazy. His latest book, Heart Disease Is Curable (Doubleday, Doran; $1.98), out last week, goes on to show what avoidance of exercise can do for heart disease.

The Patients. "Heart disease," he says, "does not necessarily mean doom." He gives examples:

> "Three years ago I treated a 70-year-old man whose family had resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable outcome. His wife stood by his bedside, holding his hand and trying to keep it warm as he looked up at her--an apparently dying man. Yet ... in six weeks he was out of bed. In three months he was weeding his lawn. The other day I saw him strutting downtown, his wife on his arm."

> "About twelve years ago I reported a case history of a patient who was practically a corpse when first seen in his heart attack. His blood pressure was zero, his pulse was absent, and he was apparently dead. . . . Today he is alive, happy and active."

These recoveries, Dr. Steincrohn says, are impossible for patients who refuse to take their doctors' advice. He admits it may be hard to take. A man may feel no pain once his attack subsides, and such a patient is often rebellious when told he needs weeks or months of rest or that he must change forever into a more vegetative life. There was the young man who had rheumatic heart disease:

"He was 25, intelligent . . . but ... he placed little importance on the doctor's insistence that he remain in bed. Leaving the hospital in one week against the doctor's advice, rather than resting for a number of weeks, he developed an attack of heart failure three days later. He died. This boy actually ended his own life."

The Non-Patients. Unruly as most patients (about 4,000,000 incapacitated by heart disease in the U.S.) are the non-patients who should be under treatment. There are uncounted millions of them. Anyone, says Dr. Steincrohn, who has rapid pulse, shortness of breath, palpitation, heart skips, indigestion, gas pressure, fainting spells, asthmatic attacks, cough, swelling of ankles, blue lips or fingernails, who tires easily or spits blood should go to his doctor and find out what ails him.

Better than waiting for symptoms is going to the doctor for a checkup--many a man's life has been saved because he was scared into the doctor's office by having a friend fall dead. Another group he urges to the doctor are the five or ten million who suspect they have heart disease but feel normal. Many will get good news. Dr. Steincrohn knows a woman who gave up nearly all exercise before she found out from her doctor that there was nothing wrong with her. She had unnecessarily missed five years of her favorite sport, tennis.

Though he deplores unnecessarily early deaths from heart disease and advises all precautions to prevent them, Dr. Steincrohn thinks heart disease is the ideal way to die. It should be "the grand climax of life, and it ought to occur near the conclusion of the last act--at about 80 or 90 years of age."

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