Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of DiseaseWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Science
Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Mental healing
A corresponding change has taken place in many other phases of
treatment in which alcohol was commonly used. The physician of fifty
years ago would have thought that one of his most efficient remedies
had been taken from him if he could not use alcohol freely in
tuberculosis. There are practically no well-known specialists in
tuberculosis now who recommend the use {31} of alcohol. On the
contrary, most of them point out the dangers from its use and consider
that the depression which follows even a moderate dose is likely to do
much more harm than the temporary and fleeting stimulation which it
gives can do good. In the treatment of phthisis in recent years milk
has done much more than take the place of alcohol: it has displaced it
entirely. The medical profession realizes now that what the
consumptive needs is not more stimulation--for more of that than is
good for him is forced upon him by the toxins of the disease--but more
nutrition to enable him to resist the progress of the disease and
raise his resistive vitality against its toxemia. The one stimulant
that is of service in the affection is oxygen, and even that should be
given in nature's dosage rather than by artificial means.
_Alcohol in Pneumonia_.--A corresponding change has taken place in the
professional attitude towards the use of alcohol in pneumonia. There
was a time not so very long ago when alcohol was considered the sheet
anchor of our therapeutics for pneumonic conditions, especially those
in which from the beginning a fatal termination seemed inevitable,
because of the age of the patient or some complication. There were
physicians who said that if they had to choose between all the drugs
of the pharmacopeia on the one hand without whiskey and whiskey
without all drugs whatsoever, for the treatment of pneumonia, they
would make the latter choice. We are not as yet entirely away from the
point of view that attributes a certain value to alcohol in pneumonia,
though even those who still employ alcohol are less emphatic in their
advocacy of it. Any one who has seen the result of the fresh air for
pneumonia patients will think less and less of alcohol. One well-known
clinical authority declares that the very best place to treat
pneumonia in our cities would be beneath the trees in the parks. Our
patients are being treated at the ends of wards with the windows up,
on the balconies, and on the roofs, and the death rate is much reduced
and the necessity for any other than oxygen stimulation seems much
less.
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