DOMESTIC DOCTORING.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXXII, Issue 10466, 2 October 1894, Page 3

DOMESTIC DOCTORING.

(English Paper.) The present tendency is to teach everyone a smattering of everything, and a good deal might be written in favour of such general knowledge. Bat a danger is involved in popularising information which has to be applied to sick persons, whether adults or children. We are all aware that even medical men, after five years of special training, are unable to cure all their patients; and that even they sometimes make grave mistakes in deciding on the nature of a case, and may, with the best intentions, carry out forms of treatment which are found to be mistaken. These failings should warn the public of how serious and difficult an enterprise they take up when they proceed to doctor themselves. Popular medical instruction confined to simple ailments and injuries, and to the proper mode to proceed in 1 emergencies, is quite suitable and very advantageous. Further, when such knowledge is possessed by emigrants, or others who dwell far from proper medical aid, no doubt this instruction is of the greatest value; but, when the habit of neglecting skilled advice is practised by dwellers in our towns, and cities, and when, under such circumstances, persons without proper training undertake to cure others, then nothing but harm can ensue. For even if the treatment adopted be not actually erroneous, still the persistence in it may lead to loss of time in the application of really suitable remedies, and very many children’s lives are yearly lost in London from this cause, and a reference to the reports in our daily papers will show that coronets have often found occasion to draw attention to the evil consequences of trusting to domestic medical treatment when there was no difficulty in procuring trained medical practitioners. A little knowledge of medicine is a dangerous thing, because, to obtain real success in treatment, the proper system is to treat each patient individually, recognising in him, first, an individual, and secondly, only that he is a case of a particular disease. The entirely opposite plan is apt to prevail in domestic medicine. A patient is thus looked upon as a case of bronchitis or what not, and his personal characteristics are neglected. By this vicious method people keep in the house different bottles, labelled “ Cough Medicine,” “ Rash Lotion,” “Ophthalmic Ointment,” and so on. Then everyone who coughs gets some of this mixture, and every skin eruption gets some of the lotion applied; and every ailment of the eye, whether of the sight or of the eyelids, or of the white of the eye, gets treated with the ointment. This faulty idea of curing people has led to a vast supply of so-called patent medicines (not one of which is really patented), and these are named each one after a disease, and are warranted to cure these complaints; nine cases out of ten they fail, and the reason is that the patient wanted hia peculiarities reckoned with, and not to be treated simply as a case of measles or as pleurisy. It is quite possible that a skilful doctor may see examples of a certain disease—say, neuralgia—in one morning, and yet give no two of them the same mixture to take ; on the other baud six neuiafgii! patients may each buy t>. bottle :-t Tfoaed’ Neur.il.’ome, and yet, although it mukec a mpid cure of one out of the six, it may make the other five all more or less ill iu other ways. Never trifle with disease.