A business firm or a factory, for instance, which would send home for the day each of its employees who reported a genuine case of bad headache, would, in the long run, save money by avoiding accidents, mistakes, muddles, and confusions, often involving a whole department, due to the kind of work that is done by a man or woman who is physically unfit to attempt it. And the higher the type of work that has to be done, the more the elements of insight, grasp, and sound judgment enter into it, the graver and costlier are the mistakes that are likely to be made under such circumstances. Of course, it will probably be objected at this point: "What is the use of wasting a day, or even half a day, when by taking two or three capsules of So-and-So's Headache Cure I can get rid of the pain and go right on with my work?" It is perfectly true that there are a number of remedies which will relieve the average headache; but there are two important things to be borne in mind. The first is that all of these are simply weaker or stronger nerve-deadeners; most of them actual narcotics. All that they do is to stop the pain and thus cheat you into the impression that you are better. You are just as tired and as unfit for work as you were before. Your nervous system is just as saturated with poisons, and the chances are ten to one that the quality of the work that you do will be just as bad as if you had taken no medicine. Further, like alcohol, when used as a "pick-me-up" under somewhat similar conditions, the remedy which you have taken, while producing a false sense of comfort and even exhilaration by deadening your pain and discomfort, in that very process itself takes off the finer edge of your judgment, the best keenness of your insight, and the highest balance of your control. In short, your nervous system has to struggle with all the poisons that were present before, with another one added to them! After you have taken nature's wise advice, and obeyed her orders, and put yourself at rest, then there are a number of mild sedatives, with which every physician is familiar, one of which, according to the special circumstances of your case, it may be perfectly legitimate to take in moderate doses, with the approval of a physician, as a means of relieving the pain and helping to get that sleep which will complete the cure.