Medicine: Loafer’s Heart

Every morning last week Dr. Wilhelm Raab, 65, just retired as professor of experimental medicine at the University of Vermont, did 500 half knee bends with arm swings. Before retiring he did another 500. His Boston-born wife Olga. 54, did knee bends too, but usually quit before she hit 200 because, she admits, “I get to giggling over how we must look.” Vienna-born Dr. Raab could not care less how he looks so long as he is warding off what he calls “loafer’s heart.” Dr. Raab never rides in a car or elevator if he can avoid it, wears out six or seven pairs of sole leathers a year. Loafer’s heart, he believes, is sapping modern man’s strength.

In the Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr. Raab accuses U.S. heart researchers of having neglected the relationships be tween emotional states, biochemical processes and heart disease. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), patron saint of Rus sian medicine, was one of the early work ers in this field, says Dr. Raab, and the U.S.S.R. is now putting his theories into vigorous practice.

“Athlete’s heart,” says Dr. Raab, used to be dreaded because it is abnormally large. Physicians now recognize that the trained athlete’s heart beats slower than average (about 60 to the minute); it slows down to normal rate more promptly after strenuous exercise, and it has a relatively long resting period between beats.

In the body’s balanced nervous and biochemical systems, Dr. Raab holds, there are two complementary mechanisms.

One stimulates the heart to work harder and faster, to meet the demands of stress.

For reasons that he admits are not yet clear, Dr. Raab believes that lack of steady physical exercise, even by itself, may encourage the stimulatory system to work overtime. Alone, this might not do much harm. But it is most likely to be combined with other factors that are known to damage the heart: pro longed emotional stress, high blood pres sure, coronary atherosclerosis and a high-fat diet.

A few hours’ exercise on an occasional weekend will not suffice. “To maintain . . . equilibrium in heart metabolism,’ Dr. Raab says, “one has to earn it day by day and year by year . . . Our Western so-called ‘normal’ hearts . . . are in reality pathetic artifacts, insidiously degenerating products of supercivilized soft living.”

A partial remedy for much heart disease, and the preventive for many premature deaths, Dr. Raab believes, is to be seen in thousands of Russian kurorty, where workers go for intensive physical training and reconditioning. West Germany has followed suit, with a dozen year-round centers for elderly and sedentary men. Will U.S. men voluntarily hit the shoe-leather trail? Dr. Raab doubts it and fears legislation may be needed to compel them.