Medicine: Irradiated Blood

A new treatment for the relief of severe bronchial asthma, announced last fortnight, makes use of a sensational blood purge. The “Knott technique” removes part of the patient’s blood, passes it through a precision machine which exposes it to ultraviolet light for a few seconds, then returns it at once to the veins. The new treatment was presented by Drs. George Miley and R. E. Seidel of Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Medical College before the Pan-American Homeopathic Congress in Cincinnati.

Dr. Miley had already used ultraviolet blood irradiation, first conceived in 1928 by a Seattle physicist and X-ray dealer named Emmet K. Knott, to cure septicemia or “blood poisoning” (TIME, June 24, 1940). He found that the ultraviolet rays not only killed the septicemic bacteria in the blood stream but increased the oxygen content of the blood—just the thing, he suspected, for asthmatics wheezy to the point of strangulation. In the last three years he has tried the Knott technique on 24 asthma patients, all of whom defied treatment by conventional methods such as nasal surgery, allergy studies, adrenalin, ephedrine, etc.

In the Knott technique from ½ to 1½ pints of blood (depending on the patient’s size) are exposed to ultraviolet irradiation every four to six weeks until the asthmatic symptoms decline markedly, then at greater intervals until treatment need be given only three or four times a year. Two-thirds of Dr. Miley’s asthma patients “have shown very definite improvement.”

No harmful effects have appeared, and “all patients who have been under treatment for one year or more have been enabled to lead apparently normal, useful lives again with little or no discomfort”—some of them after as many as 26 years of gasping and wheezing.