SUNSTROKE TREATMENT.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2111, 10 February 1908, Page 2

SUNSTROKE TREATMENT.

“What to do till the,doctor comes” may be fairly general knowledge m many classes of accident (says the Melbourne “Argus”) but prevalence of sunstroke is so uncommon in Melbourne that probably little is known of it-. . y A well-known doctor in a northern town, when asked the question, replied, “Hit the patient on the nose, hard,” and though the advice to the layman seems remarkable, it is sound advipo in many cases of sunstroke. Where the patient has difficulty in breathing, and becomes blue in the face, bleeding has often been resorted to by doctors, and a hit oil the nosehard— might be an efficacious, it rough, method of bleeding. The advice is not to be followed, however, where there is no respiratory trouble. Tho chief thing to be done is to get the patient as cool as possible. If an ice-cold bath is available, he may be plunged into it. Sunstroke may be divided roughly into two classes, one where the temperature is unduly high (and these are the most dangerous cases), and the other where it is subnormal. It is in the high temperature cases that every effort must be made to cool the patient. Doctors’ opinions differ as to whether stimulant-, in the shape of alcohol, should be administered, though nearly all medical men will administer stimulant drugs. Patients treated at the hospital are practically" packed in ice, but even this sometimes fads to reduce the temperature. A patient on Saturday night was admitted with a temperature of 106 degrees, and after an hour’s treatment his temperature was 107. On the other hand, a patient' whose -temperature had reached the extraordinary height of 109 degrees, was reduced in a coppie of hours to 99 degrees. Ice, or failing that, wet clothes and baths, seem to be about tlio only akl that a layman, can render pending medical treatment of a sunstroke patient, nor does the medical treatment itself amount, in most- cases, to a great deal more than reducing t-lie temperature to normal.