TALKS ON HEALTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 October 1929, Page 3

TALKS ON HEALTH

TONIC OF HAPPINESS (By a Family Doctor). Happiness is a good tonic;, we are all agreed on that. The heart of a happy man beats a little faster' than a man plunged in .melancholy. The 'circulation is more brisk and active. (The circulation affects every part of the body. It carries fresh blood to every part, and, what is equally important, it washes oat the waste products and carries them off to the kid-, neys, where they c: n be turned out of the blood. There: ore let us be happy. Happiness is partly the result of our environment, th; t is to say external influences, and partly the result of the workings of ov.r inner consciousmess. We should th irefore try to cultivate the happiness habit. I am writing this paragraph to make you happy. Perhaps you have already had your holiday; perhaps it is at hand; if so the sun will shine brightly all through the precious fortnight; the landlady will be a perfect dear and will give you excellent food; you will meet the girl of your heart (or the man); on your return you will feel so well and strong that it will be a pleasure to get up in the morning; your employer will announce that your Services have been so well carried but that he cannot refrain from pressing you to accept a 50 per cent, rise, which you will graciously consent to; that nice little house will be completed just in time to receive, you and your bride; trade is about to revive; steady work will enable you to buy a few Savings Certificates to put by for a rainy day; your neighbours will enjoy the revival of industry, and the whole street will be one long smile; kindness and good humour will abound almost i as though this were a Christian country; no one will say,'“l cannot help your troubles”; sympathy will be found in every breast; we shall all behave like real human beings; the savagery of the jungle we live in now will give place to a policy of love and mutual help; my police-station will be closed for want of customers, and the sweet honey-suckle will twine lovingly round the old police-cells; common sense will dismiss all illnesses from our midst, and I shall gradually fade away into obscurity, starved, ruined, and broken, but happy in spite of it all to think my services are no longer required. If you have read so far, you must be feeling happier. And do not run away with the idea that I am joking-; this picture is one you can paint for yourselves to-morrow, if only you will show a little goodwill.

OVERHAUL THE CHILD I have to examine a large number of young people who have just left school to see if they are physically fit to be taken into the employ of the company who engage my services. My. job is to pick out the best candidates. It. is not always pleasant work; I often think it is hard on a boy to be turned down for some defect for which he is not responsible. But the company have their side of the question )to consider. They cannot afford to pay wages to a man who is always on the sick list. ' Some of the employees are sent abroad to spots where health is a matter of the highest importance. So I want you to think over this matter, and if your boy is nearly fourteen you must take him to a doctor and ask him to overhaul the lad and advise you. When I examine a youth and find that he has seven bad teeth, enlarged tonsils, a stuffy nose, slight impairment of hearing, a rupture in the groin, and a pale face through going to bed too late, I cannot help regretting that these defects were not all remedied a year ago. It is a great disappointment to the boy to fail to pass the doctor. Please examine your ison now, and not after I have turned him down. SEEING AND SQUINTING Give your son an eyesight test. Pin up a piece of the advertisement pages of a newspaper with type of different sizes on it. See that it is in a good light, and let the child have his back to the light. Now ask him to read out (any letters he can see at. a distance, say, of twelve feet. Compare the letters he can see with those you can see, and compare the other children as well. When they have all tried with both eyes open, try covering one oyo at a time with a piece of paper or an envelope. You will find in some (cases that the boy has one good eye which he always uses and one bad eye which is not used at a!il. By a suitable glass the bad eye can be saved and perhaps cured. If neglected, he will have to go through life with the handicap of having only one efficient eye. A squint should never be ignored. It generally means that the sight of one eye is weak. The mother always has some explanation of the squint, which is generally wrong. Every child has frights at some time of its career, just as every child has a fall. Falls and frights are often given as the cause of defects which are really due to the parents’ neglect.

SUPERFLUOUS HAIRS As I continually receive letters asking for hints on how to remove superfluous hairs from the face, I take this opportunity to devote a little space to the subject. I should like to begin by saying that, some of you are much too sensitive about this defect. \ quite agree that all women ought to make themselves look as nice as possible; it is a bad sign when a girl is indifferent as to her appearance, but there must ho a reasonable limit to all things; hyper sensitiveness becomes almost a disease in itself, and you must not imagine because you have a few hairs on yourf face that everyone is laughing at you and making fun of you behind your back.

In any case you must never ‘resort to internal remedies; it is useless and most ridiculous to swallow medicine for superfluous hair on the face. If you imagine that the drug is going to oblige you by picking the hairs on your face, and making them fall off, you are very much mistaken. Besides, if the drug would make the hair come out it would also take it off the head, and every one of your eyelashes would fall out. What a sight you would look then! Your eyebrows would disappear, and you would, look anything but a respectable and wholesome young lady of the twentieth century. It is always necessary to bear in mind the difference between the hair and the roots. You may pluck the daisies from your lawn as often as you like, but unless you dig up the roots you will never get rid of the daisies. It is the same with hairs; mere plucking out of the hairs or destroying tile hair with some depilatory is useless

if you leave the root or hair-follicle. The hair will grow again immediately if the root is left alive. Hair grows very fast. So that we must have nothing to do with internal medicines, and nothing to do with applications which destroy the hair and leave the root alive. Such preparations have to be used over and over again, and the sensitive skin cannot stand it. I cannot recommend the use of X-rays for the removal of hair from the face. If the rays are used in moderate doses, the hair always returns in a very short time, and if a strong dose is used; there is danger of causing a burn, which is dreadfully disfiguring.