Medicine: A for Acne

Self-conscious sufferers from acne (disfiguring skin disorder) may soon become conscious of Dr. Jon V. Straumfjord of Astoria, Ore. Nine out of ten people break out with acne during adolescence or later. Dr. Straumfjord is convinced that he can help most such sufferers, by large doses (100,000 units) of vitamin A every day. In Northwest Medicine he gives the results of his treatment of a sample group of 100 patients. They took the vitamin from three months to a year before they looked any better, but out of the 100 “79 became free, or nearly free, from the eruption and only three were unimproved.”

Acne has been blamed on overactive glands, eating too much fat, constipation, heredity, iodized salt, infection, nervousness, allergy, frustrated love life, indigestion, picking. Dr. Straumfjord believes that, no matter what else may be wrong with a patient, acne always develops in a skin coarsened by “follicular hyper-keratosis”—i.e., hardening and coarsening of the tiny skin follicles (pores). This condition of the follicles, says he, “differs in no important way from the descriptions of the follicular lesions attributed to vitamin A deficiency”; in fact, he thinks the two conditions are identical.*

Many experienced dermatologists last week read Dr. Straumfjord’s claims with an interest tempered with skepticism. Most of them have fought acne with vaccine injections, soaps, yeast, X rays, ultraviolet rays, lectures against picking, antiseptics, astringents, medicated creams, diets, vitamins, hormones, encouragement. They have seen one case yield to X rays, another resist. To them acne is still one of medicine’s most baffling mysteries.

*A rough way of judging lack of vitamin A is to examine the skin, look for pebbly or horny areas on the face and upper arms or yellowish, thickened spots on the eyeballs. Dr. Henry Borsook of the California Institute of Technology last year used these criteria in examining hundreds of Lockheed workers, concluded that “nearly every subject showed evidence of vitamin A deficiency (past or present).”