Dr. Faust in Skirts

When Ponce de Leon sought the fountain of youth, he had to slosh through Florida's Everglades and cypress swamps. Rumania's Dr. Anna Asian took an easier course: from modern chemistry's shelf of wonder-working drugs, she picked a familiar item that, she thought, had shown some rejuvenating effects. That was ten years ago. Last week Dr. Asian's purported cure for the ravages of age was exposed as merely the latest in an arm-long list of quackish remedies. If it does anybody any good, it is mainly by the power of suggestion.

In 1949, Dr. Asian, working under aged Hormone Specialist Constantin I. Parhon, noted that some of the oldsters whom she treated for hardening of the arteries and for arthritis seemed to show improvements in memory, hearing, eyesight and skin texture. Instead of attributing this to the betterment in their general condition, Dr. Asian put her faith in a specific drug she was using and embarked on a wholesale treatment plan. Rumania's Communist government set up the Parhon Institute of Geriatrics in Bucharest. There Dr. Asian has treated 7,600 patients, aged 62 to 92.

Because Dr. Asian talks about the "vitaminlike" effects of her pet drug, and labels it "H3," it has been widely and wrongly described as "Vitamin H3" There is no such vitamin. And the drug is no vitamin; it is the familiar painkiller and muscle relaxant, procaine. It has been on the market for 50 years under dozens of trade names (best-known: Novocain), is currently peddled in a variety of forms by no fewer than eleven U.S. drug houses.

Procaine is universally accepted as a potent and useful drug. Besides its value as a painkiller, it is helpful in restoring a syncopated heartbeat to normal, in relieving asthma and itching, and in many forms of arterial disease. Still unexplained is procaine's mysterious power to give relief in certain cases of rheumatoid arthritis, but this is a totally different disease from the arthritis of old age for which Dr. Asian uses it.

Despite procaine's availability in every drugstore, some physicians in Western Europe and North America have been hoodwinked into importing H3 from Rumania at great trouble and expense. The British Medical Journal snapped last week that Dr. Asian's "published papers and her recent lectures in London fail to disclose any scientifically valid evidence in support of her conclusions." When Dr. Asian, 63, hit Paris to spread her gospel of H3 magic, France-Soir dubbed her "Dr. Faust in Skirts."

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