Doctor's Little Helpers

Once Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes found a patient reading up on his disease. "Look out!" warned the doctor, "or you'll die of a misprint some day." Last week, to replace old-fashioned medical "encyclopedias," a group of eminent physicians, headed by Stomach Specialist Walter Clement Alvarez of the Mayo Clinic, published a series of little books (Help Your Doctor to Help You; Harper; 95-c-) on five diseases (twelve more are coming). The books, which were displayed for the first time at the College of Physicians meeting in Boston, are for popular consumption, are supposed to contain no medical misprints. They will be sold in all bookshops next week, will soon go on sale in drugstores, railroad stations, newsstands. Some of their wisdom:

Food Allergy. Babies may become sensitized to foods for life when, instead of living on mothers' milk, they "have to digest as best they can potentially harmful 'foreign proteins' that come from a cow." Adults may become sensitized to some foods because "on a certain occasion they ate so much of some food that all of it could not be digested and some of it passed unchanged through the wall of the bowel and into the blood stream." Skin tests to find annoying foods give "erratic results," are a waste of money.

"Desensitizing" injections seldom work. Those who cannot stomach most ordinary foods should experiment with exotic dishes such as wild rice, zucchini, kumquats, papayas, chestnut flour, bamboo shoots, reindeer meat.

Migraine. Blinding, pulsating, onesided headaches are caused by a hereditary peculiarity of blood vessels in the brain and neck. An emotional upset or an irritating food may cause them to open wide; then blood goes pounding through with extra force. Remedies: 1) a calm life; 2) abstention from annoying foods; 3) aspirin tablets, benzedrine, black coffee or ducking in cold water for mild cases. If a patient can scent it in advance, a dose of the drug gynergen will nip a migraine headache in the bud; once the throbbing begins, this medicine is useless. Gynergen often produces jitters, vomiting, circulatory disturbances in the fingers and toes. Oxygen inhalations "often work miraculously" but must be taken in a doctor's office or hospital for an hour or two.

Colitis. The colon is next to the tail end of the large intestine. It may become sore from emotional strain, passage of rough food, hereditary kinks. The trouble is usually not serious, and a nervous person must learn to "live with his colon." Before going to parties, those who "fill up quickly with gas . . . can often get great relief by taking a teaspoonful of paregoric or a quarter of a half grain of codeine sulfate."

Gallstones. About one-third of all elderly women have gallstones. If a patient suffers recurring attacks of colic--sharp pains in the right ribs and under the right shoulder blade--she had best have her gall bladder removed. There is no method of dissolving gallstones, no medical treatment to cure colic, no diet which will heal a scarred sac. Once her gall bladder is removed, a woman can get on very well, provided she follows a bland diet.

Ulcers. There are two main types of ulcers in the digestive tract: 1) those of the duodenum (pronounced du-oh-dee'-num); 2) those of the stomach. For both, a mild, milky diet and a calm, easy life may bring relief. Ulcers of the duodenum may be removed by a surgeon, but usually they return in worse form. Only consolation: duodenal ulcers practically never turn into cancer.

Surgeons have been more successful with stomach ulcers. But in many cases, even if they are apparently cured without surgery and cause no pain, stomach ulcers secretly become cancerous. A man who has once suffered from a stomach ulcer should have himself examined frequently, no matter how well he feels.

The doctors are frankly pessimistic about both types of ulcer, for they arise from a nervous temperament. "Often the only really effective cure for an ulcer," they wrote, "would be an annuity." Great hope for ulcer victims lies in development of new chemicals which prevent the stomach from producing too much acid (TIME, April 28),

In the Southern Medical Journal Dr. Howard Bruce Shorbe of Oklahoma City warned automobile drivers to keep their elbows off the window ledge. Dr. Shorbe has treated 32 elbows that stuck out too far, were sideswiped by other cars, by trucks, a horse, a mule--and most were crippled for life.

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