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Show Warns on Feigrning Illness. Don't starve yourself and feign illness. ill-ness. It is relatively easy for a physician to tell the difference between be-tween intentional fasting and the weakness and loss of weight caused by such diseases as tuberculosis and dysentery. Don't try to knock out your teeth or have some of them extracted. The examining dentist can tell very easily whether their removal was necessary. Don't stick a pin or a toothpick through an eardrum to ruin your hearing. With the otoscope, a surgeon sur-geon can tell in a few seconds whether you have deliberately ruptured rup-tured the eardrum. Such injuries usually heal rapidly and you'll be in the army in spite of yourself. Don't feign an inability to read a chart in .an eyesight test. Don't try to memorize a sight-chart sight-chart in order to pass an examination exami-nation to get into the army. The army surgeons have a habit of switching such charts rapidly. The tricks used to pass the physical phys-ical examinations are just as numerous numer-ous as those in trying to fail it. To date almost 45 per cent of the men called up for examination have been turned down for mental or physical disability and at least half of those rejected were trying to get into the army. Sick Men Seek To Enter Army Try to Cover Up an Illness In Hope of Getting Benefits Later. WASHINGTON. It is becoming even harder to get into the army than it is to try to avoid service. Army surgeons say that they are discovering many men who try to cover up an illness to get in the army, serve for a few months and then claim service-incurred disability disabil-ity in order to obtain pensions, insurance in-surance benefits and care in a veterans' vet-erans' hospital. These physicians and those on local lo-cal boards are, as a result, more alert now than during the World war to catch such men the army calls them "goldbrickers" and save the government hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospitalization, hospitaliza-tion, bonuses and pensions. Not all of them can be caught during their physical and mental examinations, ex-aminations, Lieut. CoL Albert Groves Hulett of the army medical reserve corps declared in an article in the Military Surgeon, official journal of the Association of Military Mili-tary Surgeons, but they usually are soon after induction. Condemns Yellow Streak. The physicians divide ailing men into three classes the malingerers who will do anything to keep out of the army, the malingerers who want to get in and be taken care of by the government, and the men who conceal a real illness in order to get in the army and serve their country. "It is indeed devastating to recognize, rec-ognize, as we must, that all men are not possessed of manhood, and that the yellow streak down the backs of some of our fellows is invisible in-visible to the unaided human eye," Colonel Hullett declared. The army was doing its utmost, he added, to weed out the thousands of men who were potentially insane and who might disrupt an entire company or regiment. It would not be fair to the country, to the army, the surgeons or to the malingering selectees themselves, as officials see it, to reveal some of the tricks which have been discovered. discov-ered. Here are a few hints, however: Don't take drugs to stimulate your heart rate. You will be put in an army hospital, under close observation observa-tion until the effects of the drug wear off, and then be brought up for re-examination. |
