Rational Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN COMPLICATING MANIFESTATIONS IN TUBERCULOSIS. Consumptives under treatment, even when comprised among the eminently curable cases, may at some time or other be seized with certain major or minor complications in the presence of which it is highly necessary for both the patient himself, the persons in his immediate vicinity, and the physician to keep their heads and not jump to the conclusion--especially the family--that things are turning out very badly and all hope is lost. The disturbances which make their appearance as a result of overstrain will be first taken up. I. Complicating Disturbances Due to Overstrain. These disturbances constitute a most interesting phase of the clinical history of tuberculous patients. It should not be concluded, from the fact that a number of these disturbances are best observed in patients undergoing the rational hygienic treatment, that they are of significance only as medical curiosities. On the contrary, they are of distinct importance to the practitioner called to see for the first time a consumptive subject living at liberty--which means nearly always in a constant condition of overstrain. It is, indeed, to this group that belong the vast majority of tuberculous cases, the remaining few being either aggregated in sanatoriums or, in still rarer instances, undergoing the rest treatment in individual seclusion. Nothing is more dissimilar to a consumptive left to his own devices than the same consumptive under sanatorium treatment. When at liberty, the tuberculous patient exhibits in maximal intensity all the symptoms that the actual diseased areas in his lungs may produce, all the reactions of a general order they may evoke, and all the complications that may succeed them. His entire org...