Doctor ‘shocked’

Press, 7 December 1978, Page 21

Doctor ‘shocked’

A doctor who practises in one of the poorer suburbs of Christchurch says he is often shocked at the way he finds people living when he visits their houses.

"I walked into one State house during the winter,” he says, “and found 22 people all keeping warm around one coal fire.” Women in his area have a much higher than usual proportion of abnormal pregnancies. Half of them require special attention because of problems arising during pregnancy. “Obstetrics can always be correlated to socialeconomic factors. Diet is a possible factor.” He also finds a high incidence of hearing problems in school children. “It is an exception to get a normal hearing test back from the kids I see with ear problems. In the last two years I’ve had 60 kids needing surgical attention to their ears.” The reason, he feels,

could be either ignorance of what the symptoms mean, or an inability to pay the cost ($2) of taking a child to the doctor. Often the children are not brought until there is pus streaming from their ears. “A lot of my patients are living below the poverty line,” the doctor says. “Often they are people with many children.” Sometimes the cases give a pathetic insight into the problems of poverty. One child from a large family (in which the father was working) was brought to him apparently paralysed. The boy’s shoes were so worn that they were disintegrating, and when the doctor took the shoes off he found the child was wearing an adult’s sock with a knot tied in the end. The “paralysis” was all in the mind. The child had decided not to walk any more under those crippling conditions. He

was one of five children, and his mother was confined to bed with asthma for three months without medical attention. In the doctor’s view, many of his patients are caught in an “overlap” between poverty, ignorance, lack of education, and bad social circumstances such as the clustering of State housing.

He sees no malnutrition, but he knows of children who are given ice blocks to suck when they are hungry. And he detects iron deficiency, caused by not ‘enough meat and green vegetables, in 40 per cent of pregnancies. Another indicator of poverty in his area is the frequent outbreaks of head-lice and scabies. Many parents seem close to despair. The doctor has been called to wake up children who have been doped with sleeping pills because their parents could not cope.