COMPARATIVE EFFECTS ON EARLY SYPHILIS OF COMBINED AND OF ALTERNATING TREATMENT

Continuous treatment is generally acknowledged to be superior to the intermittent type in the treatment of early syphilis. The simplest and most commonly used form of continuous therapy consists of courses of an arsphenamine alternating with courses of a heavy metal. Various forms of combined treatment, in which the two types of drugs have been given at the same time through at least part of the treatment, also have been widely used. In most of these modifications, the period of simultaneous administration has been comparatively short, or treatment was given intermittently rather than continuously. Stokes¹ more recently has used a "simultaneous (concurrent) continuous" form of therapy in which the individual courses are much longer than the intervals between courses. The results of this particular form of treatment have not been reported as yet.

In the last ten years in the syphilis clinic of the Stanford University School of Medicine,