HEALTH NOTES

Southland Times, Issue 20487, 15 May 1928, Page 13

HEALTH NOTES

PERIODIC EXAMINATIONS. “PREVENTION IS BETTER THAN CURE.” (Contributed by the Department of Health.) In urging the necessity for a periodic physical examination frequent use has been made of the comparison between the human body and a machine. The automobile particularly has been pressed into service to convey the idea that the human mechanism, too, would profit by an overhaul at regular intervals. Periodic physical examination has been recommended for many years; the original suggestion, in fact, seems to have been made more than half a century ago, but only within comparatively recent years has the movement received such impetus as to make it a real and important factor in the physical welfare of a nation. The reasons why health examinations are beneficial are so obvious that hardly any arguments for them is necessary. They are, of course, advantageous to the individual in that they serve to detect the beginning of organic disease or to discover the existence of definite physical impairments of which the person may have been unaware. Faulty personal habits of living, errors of hygiene, and pqpsible shortcomings in environmental conditions are frequently brought out. For instance, the opportunity of completely reviewing the physical condition of recruits by military boards in New Zealand during the Great War revealed the value and necessity of such examinations. In many of the employments, as classified, 70 per cent., and even in some cases up to 90 per cent., of the recruits were rejected from class A owing to certain disabilities and diseases, and these were men in the prime of life. The system of medical inspection* of school children affords another striking illustration of the value of the early detection of physical deformities and disease. In this case the examination also serves as a guide for parents in the selection of suitable employment for children with known defects. PERSONAL HYGIENE. As an authority has pointed out, there is a still more potent reason why the health examination movement is one of the nearest steps to public health. It is because public health has reached a stage of development where personal hygiene is getting to be more important than the control of one’s surroundings, including in that term both inanimate objects and other human beings. As the public health movement has progressed, sanitary science has triumphed over environmental conditions, and broadly speaking, over many of the communicable diseases. The sanitary engineering phase of public health in which pure water supplies, effective methods of sewerage disposal, sanitary production of milk, eradication of in-sect-borne diseases, improvement in housing, and similar engineering functions, so highly developed, has reached a point w’here now it is often a matter of routine. Of course, much yet remains to be accomplished. However, the seed has been sown and cultivated, the plant well nourished, with here and there a barren spot perhaps. Such diseases as typhoid fever are definitely on the wane. The death knell has been sounded for hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever; diphtheria is being conquered; man has vanquished smallpox, though this insfdious foe is ever watchful for the time when carelessness, apathy, and ignorance release it to ravage again. The venereal diseases have been recognized as health enemies as well as moral ones. Tuberculosis is losing in its fight on human existence. Infant mortality is also succumbing. As these diseases and their death rates go down, others rise to take their place. Cancer, kidney diseases, heart troubles, diabetes, apoplexy, and other organic diseases seem to be on the increase. The death rates from them are either rising or else the trend is stationary or only slightly downward. The secret in combating these maladies in every case is in an early diagnosis. For that matter diagnosis at the very onset is important in checking any disease, and applies with special emphasis to many of those which have been previously mentioned, such as tuberculosis. The average span of life in New Zealand is increasing, but it would forge ahead much faster if the present knov\Hedge regarding communicable diseases was universally applied. It will increase even more when the rules of personal hygiene are thoroughly employed. In the meantime, and for all time, health examinations have a real place in the advancement of our national vitality. TAKEN IN TIME. What is the periodic health examination? By a periodic health examination we mean the use of all those resources of a physican, by question, observation, and tests, through the application of which he distinguishes between health and disease, when applied to persons who, so far as they are aware, are not suffering from an disability or disease. The physican is faced with a client, a pupil seeking guidance in health, rather than sought by a patient who believes himself to be sick.. The health client comes to learn whether in his happy disregard of minor discomforts, or shall we say while inattentive to slowly-developing and insidious disease, he is as well as he is capable of being, and by a better adjustment to his fellows and to his physical surroundings, and to the obligations to his work and family, he may escape -the too rapid advance of the infirmities of his years and correct the habits at fifty which may have been safe and useful at thirty. M'hen people are subjectively aware of disease, the time has usually passed for the most hopeful and effective curative or corrective treatment. Only by detecting tuberculosis, syphilis, cancer of tongue or lip, diabetes in the earliest stage, even when the patient is wholly satisfied with his apparent state of health, can we most nearly approximate cure by the use of the medical sciences. Enough has been indicated to stress the importance of a periodic physical examina tion of the human machine by the family doctor, more especially so from the age of 40 years upwards when the diseases men tioned often have their onset. For the protection of workers in what are known as dangerous trades, in certain cases such examinations are compulsory b” law. It is realized in these trades from experience that prevention is better than cure, and the profound wisdom of this old maxim equally applies to all walks of life. However, one should not be unduly and morbidly solicitous about one’s health and drift ingloriously into the ranks of the valetudinarians, a class so abhorred, according to Boswell, by Samuel Johnson. Yet at the same time, though death is a necessary and inevitable end, it behoves all individuals to avail themselves of every means to prolong existence at least to three score years and ten, and one of the important means to this end is an occasional overhaul by a qualified physician skilled by experience and training in the early signs of the ills that flesh is heir to.