Preventable Illness.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 298, 16 December 1931, Page 6

Preventable Illness.

Health Talks

By a Family Doctor. QNE THOUGHT would come to the minds of anyone taking a general survey of all this suffering: “ Can it not be prevented?” We can all see how hopeless it is to attempt a cure. Who can restore sight to the blind or hearing to the deaf? But what strikes anyone working - among children, either at school or in the hospitals, is that an enormous amount of the illness is preventable. It is not so much that we are waiting for the new discovery by the doctors of some marvellous panacea which will wipe all illness away. The problem rather is to seek how to apply the knowledge we already possess. The weapons for fighting disease are, in the main, not wonderful scientific instruments or weird electrical appliances, but just “ common sense.” It is only by good food, fresh air, sunshine, sleep and exercise that we can hope to beat the forces of disease. Poison and Antidote. The body itself contains a whole armamentarium for fighting and defeating disease. The child lying in bed is not the easy victim of disease—a tremendous fight is going on night and day between the microbes and the poisons they manufacture on the one hand, and the tissues of the body and the antidotes they manufacture on the other hand. But the body cannot resist successfully unless it is in good health. Now there is a large amount of preventable illness in the country, and much of it is due to parental neglect. A mother will know all about her household linen, but nothing about her own children’s teeth. A woman would be ashamed to have a dirty doorstep, but she is indifferent about the teeth, which form the doorstep into her own child’s system. Or take spines as another instance—how many parents examine their children’s spines to see if they are straight? Very few, I am afraid. Yet curvature of the spine can only be cured in the early stages. If the precious years of childhood are allowed to slip by, the harm is done and can never be undone. Do It Now. It is interesting to remember that a child’s skeleton is made not entirely of bone, but of soft cartilage or gristle mixed with the bone. So a child’s bones can be bent and moulded in the right or the wrong way. But in whatever way the bones grow, there soon comes a time when the soft cartilage has all been displaced by hard bone. Any attempt to mould the hard bone will be useless. You might as well attempt to alter the shape of a vessel of potter’s clay after it has been baked, or to bend an oak tree long after the stage when it was a pliable sapling. The first important point is to examine the child in a good light. Tell the child to open his mouth wide, and examine every tooth, one after the other, in the upper and lower jaws. It is easy to see black spots of decay or hollow teeth, and no child should be allowed to have an unsound tooth in its head. Gumboils, abscesses, neuralgia, sleeplessness follow in the wake of bad teeth. Moreover, germs find their way into the neck through hollow teeth, and diseased sockets and swollen glands are the result. A child’s mouth should be absolutely sweet and clean. After the back teeth, examine the front teeth, making the child draw the lips back. Hearing and Sight. Then test the child’s hearing by noticing how far away from the ear a watch can be heard ticking. Compare the distance with your own hearing, or with another child’s. The next step is to test the sight. Pin up the advertisement sheet of a newspaper at the other end of the room in a strong light. Ask the child to read the large and small letters, and notice what size he cannot see. Compare the result with what you can see for yourself. Try first one eye and then the other. It will often be found that there is one eye better than the other and doing all the work.