No one can witness the old Russian-born doctor dealing all morning with a houseful of asthmatics, then hear those people tell of their breathing easing in minutes, and not be impressed.

The NSW Minister for Health, Mr A.H. Jago, was so impressed by his visit to 90-year old Dr Alexander James in Wollongong in January that last week, he announced that a clinic would be established at Wollongong Hospital to assess his methods.

That Dr James considers his methods are already well proven augurs some difficulties for a clinic which will be directed to their scientific evaluation and not to what Dr James desires – the general treatment of asthma cases. Even the doctors who agree that Dr James gets results, hold that the example of many people who obviously have benefited by his treatment, is not enough to substantiate his claim to cure asthma without drugs.

To Dr James’ impatient assertion that he has cured thousands of asthmatics without drugs, while the orthodox profession has failed with them, they reply that no one in the scientific era of medicine has been able to advance a new treatment without controlled trials and other proofs of validity. But if Dr James is to be judged by the patients who flock from all parts of Australia and from abroad to his North Wollongong cottage, then he is already justified.

The public support for Dr James is great. When I visited him this week, he was seeing patients from Melbourne, Adelaide, Tasmania, and even one little boy from Rome, who flew back afterwards. Only a very small proportion of his patients live locally. Because most of his 18 to 20 new patients a week need somewhere to stay during their 10-day course of treatment, Dr James has become a valuable asset to the Wollongong hotel, motel and caravan park trade.

Remarkable among other things for his physical endurance, he is working seven days a week to try to reduce his waiting list of 3,000 patients.

The 28 patients who crowded into his modest cottage near the sea during the morning of my visit had known Dr James for at most a few days, but they showed a confidence in him that any practitioner might envy. Some had been waiting almost three years to see him – his secretary is still working through the 1969 bookings – and all had travelled a long, troubled road through other doctors’ surgeries and hospitals in search of lasting relief.

Dr James, erect and vital, presided over the throng like a doctor at some pre-revolutionary Russian cottage hospital. “Come on, my darling,” he said with grandfatherly playfulness as he ushered in a child for treatment with his rather ancient, unstreamlined vibration machine. He called the men darling too, with the same playfulness, but also an unaffected warmth. The women he permitted to kiss him on the cheek, and they loved it.

Only Dr James could have carried it off, but beneath the fun was a lesson for any young doctor in how to communicate with patients. But any suggestion that his compelling personality influences the results of his treatment infuriates Dr James, as it tends to denigrate the value of his methods.

As he himself says, they are relatively simple. He takes a patient, say a man, tugs up his jumper, growls at the belt he finds underneath, undoes it and lets out the waist of the man’s trousers. Why, he admonishes, does a person who already has breathing trouble, curb the movement of the diaphragm by constricting his waist? From now on, he orders peremptorily, the man must wear braces and not tight underpants. Belted patients have ransacked Wollongong for braces at times and wound up supporting their pants with improvised linen straps.

The patient, freed at the waist, is asked to breathe in deeply and breathe out again so that Dr James can measure his chest expansion with a tape. Then comes the vibration treatment, designed, Dr James says, to stimulate the autonomic nerves which govern breathing. He runs the gently vibrating metal ball on the arm of the machine over the patient’s spine, up the back of his neck, then over the forehead and above the nasal sinuses.

After no more than two or three minutes of this Dr James takes the man’s chest expansion again and brandishes the tape to show it has increased two inches through the nerve stimulation. He extends his hand and says, “Congratulations. You are cured from asthma for the rest of your life.”

Like other patients Mr Walter Barnes, 67, of Bathurst, acknowledged that he was indeed breathing more easily after the vibrotherapy. He had been on cortisone for two years. Orthodox asthma specialists say this sort of improvement can be expected from the psychological boost of any radical change in treatment.

Although Dr James pronounces the patient cured with total conviction, vibrotherapy is only a prelude to breathing exercises and physiotherapy given by his daughter Nina and a former woman patient trained in his methods. Patients have vibrotherapy each day and are put through eight sets of exercises during the 10 sessions. They get no more vibrotherapy when the course ends but must keep up their exercises morning and night and must remember to take three deep breaths during the day.

At the start of the course Dr James gives a little lecture on the need to breathe through the nose, gives his definition of asthma – “essentially a condition where the lungs are deprived of room by immobility of the chest cage” – and tells patients to stop taking their asthma drugs forthwith.

He makes only one exception, cortisone, saying that this drug should be tapered off gradually because of the risk of adverse effects from abrupt withdrawal. Patients I talked to spoke of giving up as many as four different drugs, and being free from asthma after a few days of the James course.

Mrs Jessie Adams, 35, of Canberra, who has had asthma since the age of 18 months, attributed her relief from breathing difficulty partly to a psychological element in the treatment, but mainly to Dr James’ breathing exercises. “I have been to other physiotherapists,” she said, “but this is the first time I have been taught to use the top half of my chest.”