MEDICAL NOTES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 134, 8 June 1929, Page 13 (Supplement)

MEDICAL NOTES.

ASPIRIN. NATURE AND' ACTION. PNEUMATICS AND PNEUMONIA." (By PERITUS.) As the medial profession has failed lo find a preventive or a cure for the "common cold," and its ugly sister influenza, the public has attempted—as the public always will—to discover a cure for itself. The fashion in "cold" remedies has ranged from port negus, through all the alcoholic gamut, to hot rum and water, and down the scale to hot lemon drink. From the posset of Pepys to the lemon drink the basic idea has been to promote an excessive perspiration. "Hot bath, hot drink, and bed," was the common prescription forty, years ago and previously. The homeopathic followers of Epps used a drug for the "working up of a good sweat," and to this day it is generally acknowledged that sweating reduces fever and lessens the severity of the disease. For children—who might boggle over hot rum and water —the remedy was at one time a hot foot bath, the nose gently rubbed with hot tallow, the chest rubbed with any mild embrocation, and then covered with cotton wool. Chemists and patent medicine vendors have advertised cold cures and influenza cures, even sometimes when themselves confined to bed with these very sanie illnesses. Each generation "has seen its special popular remedy, r ~om Spanish onions and vegetable soup,'ipecacuanha and opium, and more recently aspirin. Aspirin is descended from the marriage of carbolic acid and carbonic acid gas (producing salicylic acid), which led to the evolution of salicylate of soda, or acetyl- salicyl of aspirin. Salicylic acid is also found in a natural state" in oil of wintergreen. The acid is the powerful agent used to 4f s f° v corns, and was at first used (diluted) as an internal antiseptic, and found to be an efficient remedy for rheumatism. There were, however, disadvantages attached to its use, and the soda salt (salicylate of soda) has since become tne standard remedy for acute rheumatism. Salol, Saletin and Salacetm are ail members ot the aspirin group, and in many ways have the character ot quinine. '" • . . - . Whatever benefit may te ./ den from taking aspirin, is due to its.acton as an antifeptic. It is passed through the stomach unaltered, and even m tne small intestine does not always dissolve. ■ unless taken as a P°wder. In feverish cases aspirin reduces tempera ture temporarily, and causes free sweating. No such action takes place in bodies of normal temperature. Where fver there is pain due to a« toxic. coa-J

dition of the bowel (making the blood impure), as in headache of rheumatic 'origin, or due to bowel disorder, the antiseptic action of the aspirin mayreduce it. In most rheumatic pains it is also of value, but as a "cure-all," a general- remedy for the numerous ills it has been said to alleviate, it has no effect beyond the mental, and to make a habit of taking it is to court chronic dyspepsia as the natural action of the digestive function of the bowel is necessarily interfered with, the presence of a disinfectant introduced from without affecting the blood and all normal secretions. So greatly has this form of selfdrugging grown during the last few years that in the English House of Commons it has been suggested that a law should be passed limiting its use to medical prescriptions.

i Pneumonia. There is nothing new under the sun. Forty years ago some keen observer, noting how the butcher loosened the skin of a sheep by making an incision in the !hind leg and blowing up the carcase; suggested that travellers by sea should have a permanent opening made in the skin of-the chest with a button and rubber tube attached, so that in the event of shipwreck the traveller could blow up his own skin and remain buoyant until rescued! Now there comes a cable stating that an Australian doctor suggests hypodermic doses of oxygen gas as a treatment for pneumonia. His idea being that inhaled oxygen cannot be absorbed by the blood whilst the lungs are partly solid from the deposit of the disease, and that oxygen pushed under the skin will be directly absorbed by the circulation. As a single bubble of gas in a vein may cause a fatal result, the hypodermic use of oxygen will need care. I presume that the doctor has _ some method of deflating his patient in the event of tardy absorption or overdose. The collapse and resting of a lung by air pressure has been often practised, but the under-skin oxygenation idea is quite new and original in human pneumatics. Pneumonia has been "cured in so many different ways that most text books leave the practitioner freedom of selection from a bewildering list ol "remedies."