WHAT IS CAUSING WOMEN TO DROOP?

Putaruru Press, Volume XXVI, Issue 1313, 20 January 1949, Page 7

WHAT IS CAUSING WOMEN TO DROOP?

MORE AILMENTS THAN MEN Conditions In Britain The women of Britain are not well. They are not invalids or even absentees from work to any great extent, but they go about their daily duties, feeling below par, states a contemporary. When they go to the doctor they do not know what is wrong with them. But the symptoms they describe are alwaps roughly the same. They are easily tired. They lack energy. They suffer from shortness of breath if they exert themselves. Everything is an effort —which worries and depresses them. The doctor,? call it lassitude. They find just what they expect to find—low blood pressure and 1 varying degrees of anaemia. I have discussed this, prevalent condition, which is affecting young women as well as older ones, with a dozen doctors of widely different types of practice. Anaemia, several said, is the basis of most current ill health among women. “There has been an enormous l increase,” one said. “Where I was treating eight new cases a year, I now have as many a month. I have never in my life seen 00 many anaemic women as now come to me.” The cause, doctors say, is partly nutritional and partly the years of strain, overwork and wor-y. One doctor called them “the years of far too much standing about.” Especially in the case of expectant mothers doctor,? put their finger on a fault in the new health service.

Clinics are not allowed to prescribe. So, after a woman has at

tended for advice and been told he needs iron to counteract anaemic tendencies, she is referred back to her own doctor for a certificate to lake to the chemist. This means going to her doctor’s surgery, and probably a long wait Either she hasn’t the time or she doesn’t take the trouble—and goes without the iron she needs. “Rations,’’ doctors say, “are deficient in iron. Liver, kidney, red meat—the principal sources of iron —are very scarce. “Nobody is going to eat spinach all the time!” Anaemic lassitude is particularly prevalent among married women who have had a child or two, ev>en where the mother is no older than the late twenties. “They just lack kick,” said one doctor. The last health survey showed seven in every 10 housewives “complaining”—that is, when asked if they were well or ill, said that they “weren’t well.” Women suffer 25 per cent, more minor ailments than men, but even at that, it is many doctors’ view that they stand up to physical troubles better than men and make less fuss. Child 1 health is on the whole good, but—as one doctor put it—children have more difficulty in getting themselves born. His experience shows a lower fertility rate than before the war. Women are not 00 prone to pregnancy. Also they have a greater tendency to miscarry. Mothers often blame the experience of bombing for any weakness or abormality in wartime childx-en. Doctors say this is generally nonsense. Young children who lived through air raids, unless physically injured, were totally unaffected by the experience.

But babies born during or even after the raid periods sometimes did suffer through their mothers. Strain and emotional disturbance had its post-war effect on women in nervous disorders, chronic fatigue and depression, and premature ageing. One general practitioner finds that the most difficult—and, in his view, the most pathetic—patients are the middle-aged and approaching “elderly” of both sexes.

“Fat too many people who were in their prime before the war overdrew on their future income of nlervous energy. They were keyed up during the war, felt they had to keep going, and, since 1945. they have been running down far too fast.” A busy suburban G.P. had this theory about the present medical situation:— * Unconsciously, many people are looking for a scapegoat for that 4s Hd or (3s lOd) a week they have to pay. They scan the benefits and say to themselves : “Unemployment? No good to me. I’m working. I hope I’ll never need that. “Retirement? Not for years yet. Death ? Lots of use that’ll ever be to me. Maternity? I’m not even married. , “Medicine—ah! That’s where 1 can get my money’s worth.’’ So they become—without really realising they are doing it—illnessr conscious to an extent undreamed of before. And, this doctor argues, by @0 transferring what are really political and economic sensations to the realm of! bodily health, they genuinely accentuate their ailments.