STUDYING TO KEEP WEIL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22963, 19 August 1936, Page 10

STUDYING TO KEEP WEIL

There is a curiously illogical outlook which almost everyope adopts in fact, if not in theory, with respect to medical practices, asserts Dr Wyndham E. B. Lloyd, in “A Hundred Years of Medicine.” The doctor lives by sickness, not by health. The more people who are ill, the more the doctor earns, and most people take this state of affairs for granted. This is not to suggest that the private practitioners are not for the most part wholly upright, ethical and competent; but there ought to be more doctors who are paid to keep us healthy, and then we should need fewer to try to put us right when we have fallen ill. Ignorance of elementary biology is largely to blame. Everyone should be taught to go to the doctor to find out how to keep well and not to wait until sickness has struck him down. Unfortunately, It is improbable that many people will be persuaded that it Is to their advantage to pay a fee to a doctor when they are feeling perfectly well. This is a kind of thrift which will hardly appeal to the masses. _____