Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social WorkerCabot, Richard C. (Richard Clarke)
Science
Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker
Cabot, Richard C. (Richard Clarke)
Charities, Medical; Friendly visiting; Medical social work -- United States; Social service
Take the case of those maimed by war or accident. There are three
classes of them: first, the people who will get back their jobs and get
back into industry unaided; they are probably the majority. Then the
people who cannot be put back by any process. Finally, there is the
rather small intermediate class who, with our help, with a little extra
education, with a hand in the back, will get back into work, but who
never would succeed, humanly speaking, without our help.
So it is in disease. _The vast majority of diseases get well without any
help from anybody_, and that is the thing we must teach most often and
to most people, in season and out of season. In our day and generation
few people get a chance of observing that fact, because somebody comes
along and gives them a drug. And unless one has seen people get well
without any drugs, one continues to believe that it was the last drug
given that cured every case of illness one has known to get well. On the
other hand, the majority of illnesses that do not get well without
drugs will not get well at all. I have mentioned before the figures
which seem approximately true in relation to the cure of disease by
drugs. Drugs will cure about six or eight diseases out of about one
hundred and fifty diseases known to science. Anybody who fails to give a
drug for one of those six or eight diseases is criminally negligent. We
should press that drug upon the patient. I do not want anybody to think
that I do not believe in drugs. I believe in them tremendously, in the
particular cases where they are of use. But I do not stand for the habit
of bolstering up people's beliefs that we have drugs all ready to cure
most diseases.
I think the future of cure by drugs is very hopeful. I do not feel
hopeless of our discovering drugs for the one hundred and forty-two out
of one hundred and fifty diseases which we still cannot cure. But if we
falsely suppose that we have a cure already, we do not hustle around to
get it. It is not until we realize that we have not a cure already, that
we do hustle around to get it. _It is not until we realize that we are
now very helpless in medicine that we shall labor in a way to become
less so._ At present the best that we can do for most patients is to
explain what the trouble is, let them know what is going to happen, to
preach some hygiene, and above all to make them realize that we care and
suffer with them. That is the essence of medical work and of the social
assistant's work in the dispensary and in the home.
_Industrial disease_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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