STARVE A COLD

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 16, 19 January 1924, Page 15

STARVE A COLD

_ Fqed a cold and ' starve'a fever." This phrase. is'so well known that it has become a sort of "household word." People have got it into their heads as a handy way of remembering-'the treatment, for colds, and fevers, writes a nurse in the "Tasmanian Mail." But the distinguished medical man who first..'coined the phrase meant it as a warning—feed' a cold and you will have a feVer to starve! Neglect to take precautions in the way of diet when you have an apparently slight; cold, and you are inviting it to develop into a fever which will necessitate drastic dieting to the verge of starvation. He Wa3 saying in effect—"You know a. fever patient has to be starved. Well, that's what you're asking for if you eat your ordinary, heavy, solid food when you've got a cold. It's all right when you're fit; but it's dangerous when you're weakened by a cold, and it will' make your temperature rise 'to fever pitch. Be prudent; avoid some of the things you'd like to eat; otherwise you'll have to undergo much more drastic treatment for the fever that will result." , It is perfectly lobvious, because everyone knows that a bad cold is a fever. You want to cure a slight cold, lest it should develop into a feverish one. You want to prevent your temperature rising, and it is obviously absurd to use the opposite method to the one "which will-lower-it once, it has"-risen.! When ire you to decide that your cold has ceased ;to' be a cold, and reverse, your treatment because it is now a fever? Absurd, isn't it? Remember that.every cold is a potential fever; and begin your precautions to prevent the tempera- j ture rising; don't encourage it to rise, and. then, try drastic methods to send it down from fever pitch. If the good doctor had realised how prone people would be to accept a popular edict, without using their commonsense, he would have sacrificed his pithy phrasing to.'a clumsier statement that! could not have been misinterpreted to defeat the aims of medical science!