More Onions and Greens for Health

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 956, 26 April 1930, Page 8

More Onions and Greens for Health

Doctor on Treatment of Seasonal Boils INTERESTING ADVICE The skin is probably the largest and most important organ of the human body. It is a reflex agent of touch, warmth, and cold, and is so sentised that it can pick up radiations and emanations of unknown quantity or quality, and absorb them. When man lost his hairy covering, writes Dr. H. T. J. Thacker, it was meant that each day the sun and sunlight should gaze upon his naked form, and no doubt for thousands of centuries it did. As he lost his hair, the human learned to clothe and protect himself in animal skins and furs, which left part, at any rate, of his anatomy bare, and this gave access to the health-giving emanations of our sun and sunlight. A true sun bath is not a sun-toasting. at the seaside, but a sunlight ray bath anywhere and at any time. Perhaps after noon is best, as that seems to be the time that fruits ripen most. In the economy of nature there may be a reason for winter, but to most humans it is a trying time. When winter approaches, nature shuts her portals to the outward world, and if she can she sleeps. All signs of busy activity are shut down, and the trees and beasts throw off their flags of things being done, and so too does the human skin. Its delightful sensitivenesses continue alert and keen; its exhalations, its excretions, and secretions continue in a lesser degree, ahd the busy horde of active workers -go elsewhere to toil, and a certain calm pervades—that is, if all is well within. DEFENSIVE PROCESSES A state of disease is never a thing in itself, but is always a .quantitative change in some prysiologic process—an increase or a decrease of something that ought to be or was there to begin with. Perhaps all disease is a mighty effort by nature to cast out some evil devil boarding luxuriously in our human machine. Our defensive processes are less fortified than they should he—we have not put into our petrol tanks those things that will give u-s salts, vitamines, natural sweets, fats, and repairing proteins. There is a something in our blood that is due to the faulty excretion of normal excreta or the formation of some body that 4s an enemy to health in our tissues. It has many names, and will attack us as baldness, boils, or gouty neuritis and “jointitises.” As we drift into winter it begins to demonstrate that it is there, and the human begins to feel less happy, and quoth he; “I have a boil on- my neck.” Just that. Whenever you feel less happy than usual, eat less, exercise more, rest and sleep longer, and find out what your worry is. If this does not help, then the boil comes, and what a demon he is! He is just a localised culture of Staphlococri of mixed breeds, who have alighted upon a suitable nidus in a hair follicle and the sebaceous gland alongside it. Prevention is a clean neck, a nonirritant and non-dyed neckwear, and a good, pure blood stream that must not lack in the elements magnesium and potassium, sulphur and lime. Methinks when the onion harvest arrives we should have two meals a day of them, cooked tender in their skins in an open vessel, for breakfast or supper, or both; green leafy vegetables are essential to have real, red,healthy blood, no matter whether other foods taken contain lots of the vitamines A and B. If you have real red blood 3 r ou cannot have boils, furnicles, pus pimples, acne spots, blind boils or multiple carbuncles. It is a wrong practice to injure in any way a commencing boil, as most of the hardness and congestion round a boil is nature’s • magnificent defence against the Hun invader. Treat everything and every person sick with kindness and gentleness. A hospital's repute should depend mostly on its reliefs given and not on its operations. Diseased cells are more easily killed than healthy ones, therefore feed the healthy ones rightly, and they will naturally turn out against disease. DANGER OF INCISION

A boil is the result of the part of the skin attempting to repel the invasion of pathogenic organisms. The organisms cause a dilation of the engorgement around a hair follicle, by the surface blood vessels, and this causes such a tension that the pain is most acute and sickening and the patient is most impatient for immediate relief in the shape of incision, an unwise procedure, as it may open up a track to cause a general infection of the whole body. The dense, hard inflammatory infiltration causes a strangulation •of the hair follicle, its sweat gland and its sebaceous gland, and this dead mass constitutes what is called the core. To get this out is usually the mad aim of everyone concerned and usually the whole household is concerned; incision, pinching and squeezing are practised and much damage is done to the surrounding tissues, and usually a crop of boils is faithfully secured, or worse still, a rotation of crops. Treat a boil kindly, and where tissue defence is poor, as in cases of diabetes, adjacent follicles get infected and a multiple boil happens and is called a carbuncle. Here the infection may advance deeper and a huge slough may occur. This is dangerous and may cause blood infection. Infection may be carried to other parts of the skin by means of fingers, clothes, toilet articles and other agents. Nature’s wall of protection around the boil is wonderfully efficient —the better the general health, the greater the efficiency. To injure a boil by pressure or cutting reverses Nature’s methods: it causes great pain and spreads Infection. USE OF DRESSINGS

Wet and moist warm dressings, with alternate applications of antiseptic and anaesthetic ointments will rapidly aid Nature to separate the core. It the skin will not rupture this may be done by a 20 per cent, salicylic acid plaster or shaving the skin down with a very sharp sterile razor. Especial attention must be paid to boils of the upper lip. for if these are roughly handled and infection of the cavernous sinus of the brain may occur and prove fatal. This patient should be put in bed and fed with soft

food, and should neither talk, chew, eat, nor smoke. Boil owners, when convalescent, should have daily shower baths, a daily change of underclothing and fresh nightwear each night, and all towels, etc., used should be sterilised by boiling. All boil patients should be most thoroughly medically overhauled and special inquiries made for gout, diabetes, rheumatism, blood diseases, kidney trouble and constipation. Diet foods should be low in carbohydrate contents, i.e., starch and sugars, all indigestible articles cut out, and good drinks of water and fruit juices taken away from meal times. Never drink at meal times. Fresh, air, sunlight, rest, and relaxation are very necessary. Build up the general physical condition and help Nature’s defensive mechanism. Be kind to boils, but be unscrupulous about their cleansing toilets.