OCR Text |
Show Get Elderly Patient Up in Two Weeks to Avoid Death Doctors Find Confinement to Bed Hastens the End By JANE STAFFORD Atlantic City, N. J. Elderly Elder-ly persons who get sick must be gotten out of bed and back on their feet as rapidly as possible, in order to stall off death, Drs. Louis B. Laplace and J. T. Nicholson of Philadelphia Phila-delphia told members of the American Medical association associa-tion here. Confinement to bed hastens death in persons over sixty years, they found. The reason is that remaining remain-ing inactive and prone for long periods pe-riods allows the blood to accumulate accumu-late in the small veins and arteries. The total volume of blood is thus reduced re-duced and its circulation is further impeded by the hardening of the blood vessels that occurs in old age. The blood, therefore, remains in the capillaries until it is forced out by contractions of the muscles, but a person confined to bed moves his muscles so little that the blood does not circulate enough. As a result, tissues degenerate, ulcers form, and the body is slowly poisoned by absorption ab-sorption of the products from the degenerated tissues. The patient sinks into stupor and the final invasion in-vasion of the bacteria into the lungs causes the fatal pneumonia. The way to prevent all this is to order elderly patients out of bed as soon as possible and while they must remain in bed to give them massage, exercise in bed, deep breathing and frequent shifts of position. A new, quick and inexpensive test to determine whether a woman is going to become a mother was reported re-ported by Drs. John Huberman, Howard H. Israeloff and Benjamin Hymowitz of Newark, N. J. The test is made by injecting under the skin of the forearm one of the hormones present in the body of an expectant mother. If the skin becomes red and inflames, the test is negative and the woman is not about to become be-come a mother. If there is no reaction, re-action, the test is considered positive posi-tive evidence that the woman is bearing a child. The test was originally devised by Drs. G. C. Gilfillen and W. K. Gregg of Dayton, Ohio. The Newark physicians physi-cians found it 90 per cent accurate in tests of 200 expectant mothers and 95 per cent accurate in 150 women wom-en known not to be expecting children. |