TALKS ON HEALTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 March 1929, Page 3

TALKS ON HEALTH

BY A FAMILY DOCTOR AN OVER-TIRED HEART Some of you people do not respect your hearts as you ought. Faintness is the result of fatigue of the heart as well as of tho muscles of the arms and legs. When you have done a hard day’s shopping, and faint when you get home, it is your poor old hoant that finds itself too weary to pump the blood up into the brain; and as tho brain cannot work unless it has a plentiful supply of good fresh blood it I fails to do its duty, and loss of consciousness follows. Perhaps you forget that your heart is really a muscle like the biceps. It works all day and] all night and even attends to business on holidays and Sundays. It beats long before you are born, and goes on beating for a short time after you are dead. It never strikes for higher pay; it only demands care and good food.

Counting the Beats

Men who train for rowing or boxing train their biceps and calf-muscles, but neglect their hearts, and fall out before the race is finished because the heart has not been trained to stand the strain. Try the experiment of counting your pulse for one minute I while you are lying down; then sit K up and count again. You will find that the heart is beating faster. Then stand up, and again you will find an increase in the number of beats; and if, finally, you run upstairs and count,] you will find the number of beats in a minute raised by 25 per cent. Every! exertion you undertake throws more work on the heart. If you try the experiment of walking round the garden briskly, you will, as I have just described’, notice a faster action of the heart when you count the beats with a watch in your hand; but try going the same journey round the garden, carrying a heavy bag, and the rate of beating will be much higher than it was when you walked without the bag. Give It a Chance. If instead of the heavy bag you were I to put on flesh to the tune of a couple! of stone, your heart would be the first organ to feel the • difference. Hence when you put on fat, you give your heart more work in two ways; you] make it work harder because of the ■ heavier weight, and also you must remember that when you put on fat I ' some of it is deposited on the heart! itself, and that, if in large amount,] will impede the heart’s action. In ; every heart in a butcher’s shop you ’ will see some fat, and it does no harm so long as it is not in excess. The moral of all this is that you must) not allow your weight to increase to 1 such enormous proportions as one sees 1 occasionally in elderly men and wo- ! men. It is disrespectful to your hearts. * And secondly, when you begin to feel < a little faint, it is the voice of your 1 heart asking for a little rest, and you 1 must sit down or lie down to give it a chance. Cigarettes act as a heartpoison, especially the very cheap kinds. You must not smoke cigarettes until you are twenty-one, and then you £ must exercise your own discretion. £ t See the Dentist Regularly. v

When you have had a tooth-plate put in, you must be sure to report yourself regularly to the dentist, whether you feel anything wrong or not. The plate is attached to one or two teeth, and the continued efficacy of the arrangement depends on the soundness of those two supporting teeth. If one or both of them decay the whole plate may have to be altered at some inconvenience and expense. The first patch of decay gives no pain, and you may not be aware of its presence until ir is too late. It will save time, trouble, and money to visit the dentist every three or four months in order to see that all is well.

Time Requi r ed.

When you intend having false teeth put in you must arrange matters so that a reasonable time elapses between the extraction of the old decayed teeth and the making of the plate. It the plate or case is to fit accurately, you must wait until the gums have settled down into their final shape after the extractions; this takes a little time. But you say to the poor dentist that you must have the new teeth the week after next as you are going to get married, and how can you appear in the'church with toothless gums? And so the work has to be hurried. The gums have not settled into their new shape; they go on shrinking and altering after the new teeth have been fitted, and then, finally, the plate does not fit and gives you discomfort. Look ahead and make your plans and give the dentist all the time he requires-. Hair Falling Oyt.

One of the complications of influenza -is the falling out of the hair. This need cause no worry; it will all grow again. It is an example of the wellknown fact that the condition of the hair depends on the condition of the blood. After typhoid fever or any long debilitating illness the hair may fall. The roots of the hair are nourished by the blood, and if the blood is poor the nourishment is poor, and so the hair weakens. Indeed, the treatment' of falling hair is in nine cases out of ten a matter of treating the general health and leaving the scalp alone. The Missing Books.

I went once into the house of a young married lady, and while I was waiting for her to come down, I glanced at her books arranged above her writing desk. There were the usual poets, and a few novels, all in very good taste, and a number of handbooks on canaries and guinea pigs. Apparently the young lady amused herself with hobbies, an.d had taken up the breeding of canaries and guinea pigs. There were several books, all well-thumbed, as though they had been often studied. She must have acquired a large store of knowledge on the habits and customs of guinea pigs, and' her knowledge of the needs and wants of canaries must have been unrivalled. But when I looked right along both shelves I came to the end of her books, and found none on the care of children. It seemed to me a pity that a little of the time spent on reading should not have been devoted to acquiring some information about children. Never let it be said that some women show more enthusiasm about canaries and guinea pigs than about children.