PAIN AND HEAT.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 147, 23 June 1928, Page 8 (Supplement)

PAIN AND HEAT.

OLD-FASHIONED REMEDIES.

POULTICES AND PLASTER.

(By PERITUS.)

A leading article in the "Lancet" will please many elderly practitioners, who have, perhaps, been driven to abandon well-tested methods of treatment by the haghty mein and grudging service of modern nurses, who greatly dislike the "mess and bother" of using means of soothing pain and subduing inflammation by materials which in expert hands are neither "messy" nor troublesome. "There is danger," says the "Lancet," "that treatment made etisy may lead us to forget the use of and method of using some of the older therapeutic measures which have stood the teat of time, and Dn» J. H. Kellog has dons a service by drawing attention to the value of heat for the relief of pain."

The exact action of heat in this connection is not fully understood, whether it acts by increasing the local circulation or acting directly through the nerves of the skin, and thence through those of the deeper tissues, but the power of lessening pain is a specific property of applied heat, common to heat waves of all lengths, but most marked in the short waves of the infra-red rays. To obtain good results the heat must be intensive —short of burn or scald—and ,to quote the "Lancet," "careful and''continuous attention is required from doctor or nurse." There it is. The careful and continuous attention, in these days of doing little and demanding much, stand between the patient and a source of comfort and relief freely granted to patients of an earlier generation. |fow the patient gets a prick from a hypodermic syringe ! needle and the nurse can go and do something else. The hypodermic may have no effect whatever upon the injury or disease, producing only oblivion and rest, but heat applied by compress, poultice, hot-water bag, hot air, or electric current, may do more than simply give temporary relief; it has a curative influence. The use of dry or moist heat should not be deemed below the personal attention of the physician, but, as the "Lancet" says, he is not skilled in the niceties of its use.

Sir Lauder Brunton, of Hyderabad Commission fame, in one of his works, pave minute directipns for the making of a poultice. The last time I saw a nurse attempt to make a linseed meal poultice it looked more like a meal than a poultice, and even the invaluable mustard plaster is not now properly used. The mis-called "mustard leaf" of paper and croton oil is but a poor substitute. The counter-irritation set up by mustard is not really application of heat, but I mention mustard because, like linseed, it is an unfamiliar remedy to the modern nurso in private practice. No one who k seen the ?elief which follows a good poultice (or compress) in a case of abdominal colic, of the rapid improvement in pneumonia following the use of hot linseed meal, of the rest and relaxation obtained by the rheumatic under radiant heat, can ever doubt what can be done by heat therapy. There is some special virtue in hot wet poultices of linseed meal, bran, and bread, obtainable in no other form; and the same with such old friends as fomentations of poppy head, the saltbag, and the hot sponge.

It is true that the "jacket poultice" for pneumonia is difficult to apply cleanly, neatly, and thoroughly hot—yet not too hot—unless two persons are employed, and a thing like this badly done is worse than useless. "Th© knowledge of a number of practical points in what may be called minor medicine and surgery is what made the distinction between master and apprentice," concludes the "Lancet."