Word: drugged
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...almost completely paralyzed. But Shirley's father is Dr. Alvin C. Schopp, an orthopedist at St. Louis University and St. Anthony's Hospital. He had been searching for years for something that would help to give back vitality to nerves damaged by the polio virus. A new drug, Pyromen, had just come in for testing...
...Schopp talked things over with his wife, and they decided that Pyromen should be tried first on Shirley. "I was scared," Dr. Schopp says now. "But I knew the antidotes in case we needed them. We tried the drug cautiously, but in two weeks we could see improvement. We stopped the dosage for a while, then tried smaller doses and heavier doses. We were groping in the dark. But she has steadily improved. Shirley could barely move her arms before, now she runs around raising hell. She has only one slight muscle weakness in her left leg, and that...
Minor Crisis. As soon as Shirley began to get better, Dr. Schopp and two colleagues began using Pyromen on alternate polio patients admitted to St. Anthony's in the acute stage. The doctors soon found that the drug seemed to produce a minor crisis of its own: usually, a rise in temperature, often accompanied by muscle pains or cramps. None of these effects was lasting; in fact, the drug reaction seemed to be essential to successful treatment. If patients did not react to small doses, they had to have bigger doses. Then, nearly always within three days, they started...
Made by Bacteria. So far, Dr. Schopp and his colleagues report, they have treated 53 patients with Pyromen and compared them with 51 who did not get the drug. It is clear that Pyromen is no cure for polio. Among victims of bulbar polio treated with Pyromen, there were as many deaths (seven) as there were among the others. Also, polio is so unpredictable a disease that doctors may easily be fooled, and credit a drug for a patient's natural improvement. But, says Dr. Schopp, this admittedly sketchy study indicates that Pyromen helps virus-ravaged nerves to rebuild...
...Graduate of the week: Oscar L. Thompson, 45, a former longshoreman, hospital orderly, drug clerk, waiter and pantryman, who last week got his M.A. in zoology-the first Negro ever to get a degree from the University of Texas...