PAIN BANISHMENT

Evening Star, Issue 20252, 13 August 1929, Page 12

PAIN BANISHMENT

HEW ERA OF ANAESTHESIA FAMOUS SPECIALIST'S VISIT £?xk,' Uhitsd Pkess Association. 1 AUCKLAND, August 13. * Fulfilling part of his v life’s work, a crusade to join all the English-speak-ing peoples in a unified effort for the conquest of pain, Dr F. H. M'Mechan, secretary-general of the International Anaesthesia Research Society and a world authority, of anaesthesia, arrived by the Makura. He will remain in New Zealand for about three weeks, and will then go to Australia to attend the Medical Conference at Sydney. He said in an interview that the new era of amesthesia held the possibility of reducing hospital maintenance costs and wiping out deficits. Gas-oxygen amesthesia was so rapidly induced and recovery was so rapid that each patient’s stay in hospital was. so shortened that 25 per cent, more patients could bo operated on in one hospital without adding a bed or a nurse. In maternity hospitals mothers and their babies could be returned home, on the sixth or eighth day, instead of alter tho usual two weeks, and the newer gas ora would tend to wipe out a quarter of the maternal and infantile death rate.

“ perhaps tho most revolutionary field‘which the use. of anaesthetics and gases is entering to-day is that of the treatment of diseases, apart from surgery,” Dr M'Mechan said. “ Anaesthesia is being used in the treatment of diseases caused by germs which die in the air, and the use of compressed air is finding extended use in pneumonia, heart and kidney diseases, and burns, ft is not oven necessary to give oxygen by inhalation. It may be inflated under the loose areas of the skin with marked beneficial results. One London surgeon has used this method in his last 200 cases of burns, with remarkably speedy healing.”