Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the RemedyTowns, Charles Barnes
Science
Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy
Towns, Charles Barnes
Alcoholism; Opium abuse -- United States; Tobacco use
Even so I find myself irresistibly impelled to advise against any attempt
to treat such cases in their own environment, or in any environment
improvised by a local doctor. This I do only because I have known so many
cases of utter failure, so many cases where the sufferer's final hope has
been destroyed by such experiments.
PRIVATE ADMINISTRATION OF TREATMENT NOT SUCCESSFUL
The friendship existing between a physician and his patient must often
disarm the former and incapacitate him for the strict dealing that is
required in a treatment like mine. The mere fact that in caring for a
friend or one of his regular patients the doctor feels unwilling to exact
a definite charge in advance is a certain handicap here, as is also the
fact that each patient needs continual watching, and no doctor can afford
to devote his entire time and constant medical attention to one patient.
The average doctor in private practice, moreover, finds it impossible to
secure upon demand nurses of sufficient moral responsibility and medical
assistants of sufficient technical training to coöperate with him in the
work. Above all, I find that only when the patient is on premises other
than his own, in unfamiliar surroundings where he is subject to a strict
and inviolable discipline, can the best results be obtained. The doctor
who administers this treatment, if he is to win, must have every
advantage. Hospital surroundings, unfamiliar nurses, and strange assistant
doctors are of great value; but payment in advance may be regarded as the
most effective means for inducing the patient to complete the necessary
course. An amazing number of people have come to me who have confessed
that while they have from time to time tried other treatments, they have
never completed one of them. Others come in a skeptical frame of mind. I
can mention one such who had been three times to Europe, each time on the
advice of the very doctor who, as the patient was aware, had been
responsible for his forming the habit.
No physician in private practice should ever attempt to relieve a patient
from a drug habit in a manner incidental to the conduct of his practice,
though it is nevertheless true that the temptation for doctors to attempt
this are extraordinary. A patient who becomes aware that his physician
knows of a treatment which will bring relief is likely to bring to bear
upon the physician every possible pressure in the effort to induce him to
administer it. The doctor must be liberal indeed who, having made such an
attempt and failed to achieve good results with it, will acknowledge that
he was mistaken at the start.
THE NECESSITY OF A FIXED CHARGE FOR TREATMENT
The advantage of a definite charge, paid in advance, was a discovery that
I made early in my work. With a large proportion of my patients it would
otherwise have been impossible for me to obtain the definite medical
result which has characterized my work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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