USE OF ORAL PROCAINE IN CONTROL OF PRURITUS

THE EXPERIENCE of my colleagues and me with the use of intravenous procaine for the control of pruritus has been recorded.1The following report covers the results of the treatment of pruritus with procaine hydrochloride administered orally. One hundred forty-five patients, representing 23 pruritic dermatoses, were studied. Seventy-eight patients had received no previous medication, and the remaining 67 had received no relief from varied types of therapy previously administered. In the latter group were included 20 patients previously treated with intravenous injections of procaine, without relief. These will be commented upon later. For the sake of convenience, we classified these patients on a neurogenic and miscellaneous basis. In 1950, our attention was called to the use of oral procaine by Roka and Lajtha.2They prescribed procaine in aqueous solution by mouth to abolish pylorospasm. In the same year, Schapiro and Sadove3reported a patient