Page 2 Advertisements Column 2

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 408, 17 December 1932, Page 2

BLAMING THE LIVER DIGESTION MORE OFTEN AT FAULT IN HOT WEATHER With the hot, sticky weather all sorts of minor complaints crop up, and among them the wail, "this weather always puts me out of sorts. It goes straight to my liver," says a medical correspondent in the Sydney Sunday Sun. The liver is made the scapegoat for many troubles, the majority of which are really due to disorders of digestion. It is safe to say that when the average citizen refers feelingly to his liver he really means his stomach. And when he says he is 'biliops" he is using a paraphrase for "dyspetic." With the hot summery weather the digestion is liable to become disordered, owing to the large amount of water lost by perspiration, and in the case of middleaged and elderly people they do not move about so much. Eeal biliousness is fairly common as a secondary result of the above troubles. The liver itself, however, is not affected.) The liver secretes bile, which breaks up fat globples into an. emulsion which can be attacked by the fat-digestijig ferment in tHe" intestine. The bile is poured out into the digestive system through a certain canal. When there is much irritation and catarrh of the duodenum — the first part of the intestine following the stoipach (due, say, to defective elimination or overloading with food) — this canal is liable to be affected also. What happens is that the catarrh spreads back to its walls. When the bile-flow is b).o cjted, of eourse, digestion of fatty food ceases and this again leads to furth'er constipation, with sequent headache and nausea. Tliroughout aU the process, however, the liver itself is unaffected. What is at fault is the alimentary canal. All these hot-weather troubles clear up very simply under treatment. A light purgative (the * effervescent salines axe efficient) clears up the stasis, after which tlie patient should make sure that "enotigh' fluid is drunk to make up for that lost in perspiration.