Health Through Will Power

by James J. Walsh

It is easy to understand that if he made it a rule for his consumptive patients that they should eat well or not expect relief from his medicine he would secure a great many good results. Especially would this be true in many cases that came up to him from the country, had the advantage of a change of climate, and of environment and very soon found that they had much more strength than they thought they had. They had been dreading the worst, they were now led to hope for the best; they took the brake off their will, they fed well and it was not long then before they proceeded to get well.

As even a little experience with consumptive patients shows it is often difficult for them to follow directions—and keep it up—in the matter of fresh air and good food and here is where the question of the will in the [{175}] treatment is all important. Many a consumptive has in early life formed bad habits with regard to eating, especially in the direction of eating too little and refusing for some reason or other to take what are known to be the especially nutritious foods. Not infrequently indeed it is their neglect of nutrition in this regard that has been the principal predisposing factor toward the development of the disease. This bad habit must be overcome and often proves refractory.

Then it is never easy to give up the pursuit of a chosen vocation and pursue faithfully for a suitable period the humdrum monotonous existence of prolonged rest every day in the open air with eating and sleeping as almost the only serious interests, if indeed they can be called such, permitted in life. It is only those who have the will power to follow directions faithfully, whole-heartedly and persistently who have a reasonable prospect of getting ahead of their disease and eventually securing such a conquest of it as will enable them to return to their ordinary life as it was before the development of tuberculosis.

Unless patients are ready to follow directions as regards outdoor air and good food the [{176}] cure, or as specialists in tuberculosis prefer to call it the arrest of symptoms in the disease, is almost out of the question. Above all it is extremely important that those who suffer from pulmonary tuberculosis should be ready to follow directions at an early stage of their disease, before any serious symptoms develop, for it is then that most can be done for them. Many a sufferer from tuberculosis makes his or her cure extremely difficult, certainly ever so much more difficult than it would otherwise have been, because the dread of going to see a physician—lest they should be told that their affection is really consumption and demands immediate strenuous treatment—causes them to put off consultation with some one whose opinion in the matter is reliable.

This is indeed one of the principal reasons why tuberculosis of the lungs still continues to carry off so many victims every year,— because people are afraid to learn the truth. They dare not put the question to a definite issue and refuse to believe the possibility that certain disturbing symptoms represent developing tuberculosis. They defer seeing an expert; they take this and that suggestion from friends; they buy cough remedies which [{177}] they see advertised, sometimes they tinker with so-called "consumption cures." After a while an advance of their symptoms makes it absolutely necessary to see a physician but often by this time their disease has progressed from an incipient case rather easy to be treated and with an excellent prognosis to a more advanced stage at which cure is ever so much more difficult; or by this time it may even prove that their strength has been seriously sapped and they have not enough resistive vitality left to bring about reaction toward the cure.

The all-important thing for all those who have at any time lived near consumptives, whether relatives or others—for the disease is almost invariably acquired and not hereditary—or who have worked for any prolonged period in more or less intimate contact with those who had a chronic cough or who subsequently developed tuberculosis, is that on the first symptom that is at all suspicious they should make up their minds to have the question as to whether they have tuberculosis or not definitely settled and that they should be ready to do what they are told in the matter. The first symptom is not a persistent cough as so many think, nor continued loss of [{178}] weight, which is an advanced sign as a rule, but a continued rapidity of pulse for which no non-pulmonary reason can be found.

The old idea that consumptives should not be told what their affection was, lest it should disturb their minds and discourage them so much as to do them harm, has now been abandoned by practically all those of large experience in the care of the tuberculous. The opposite policy of being perfectly candid and making the patients understand their serious condition and the importance of taking all the measures necessary for cure, yet without permitting them to be unnecessarily scared, has been adopted. Their will to get well must be thoroughly aroused. After all, it must be recalled that tuberculosis is an extremely curable disease. It is now definitely known that more than ninety per cent. of humanity have at some time had a tuberculosis process, that is to say a focus of tuberculosis active within their tissues. Only about one in nine of the deaths in civilized countries is from tuberculosis. That means that at least eight other people who have not died from the disease but from something else have had the affection, yet have recovered from it. Instead of the old shadow of [{179}] heredity with its supposedly almost inevitable fatality, so that young people who saw their brothers and sisters or other relatives around them die from the disease felt that they were doomed, we now know that the hereditary factor plays an extremely minor role if indeed it plays any serious rôle at all in the development of the disease.

No affection is so amenable to the state of mind and the will to be well as tuberculosis. That is exactly the reason why so many remedies have come into vogue and apparently been very successful in its treatment and then after a while have proved to be of no particular service or even perhaps actually harmful so far as their physical effect is concerned. It cannot be too often repeated that anything whatever that a patient takes that will arouse new hope and give new courage and reawaken the will will actually benefit these patients. No wonder then that scarcely a year passes without some new remedy for tuberculosis being proposed. All that is needed to affect favorably patients suffering from the disease is to have some good reason presented which makes them feel that they ought to get better and then at once they eat better and proceed to increase [{180}] their resistive vitality. The despondency that comes with the lack of the will to be well hurts their appetite particularly and no tuberculosis patient can ever hope to recover health unless he is eating heartily. With better eating there is always a temptation to be more outdoors and the ability to stand cooler air which always means that the lungs are given their opportunity to breathe fresh cool air which constitutes absolutely the best tonic that we have for the affection.

It has been recognized in recent years that the only climates which give reasonable hope of being helpful for the tuberculous are those which present a variation of some thirty degrees in their temperature every day. Whenever this is the case chilly feelings are always produced in those who are exposed to the change, even though the lower temperature curve may not go down to anywhere near freezing. If for instance the temperature at the hottest hour of the day, say three o'clock in the afternoon, is 90° F. and that of the later evening or middle of the night is 60° F., chilly feelings will be produced. Just the same thing is true if the temperature is between 30° F. and 40° F. shortly after the middle of the day and then goes down to [{181}] near zero at night. These chilly feelings are uncomfortable, but they produce an excellent reaction in the circulation and set the blood coursing from the heart to the tissues better than any medicine that we have. In the midst of this the lungs have their resistive vitality raised so as to throw off the disease.

This is probably one of the principal reasons why mountain climates have been found so much more helpful for the treatment of tuberculosis than regions of lower elevations. Whenever the elevation is more than fifteen hundred feet there will almost invariably be a variation of thirty degrees between the day and the night temperature. There are of course still greater variations, even sixty or seventy degrees sometimes where the altitudes are very high, but this is often too great for the tuberculous patients to react properly to, in their rundown conditions. Besides, the air is much rarer at the higher elevations, breathing is more difficult, because the lungs have to breathe more rapidly and more deeply in order to secure the amount of oxygen that is needed for bodily necessities from the rarified air. The middle elevations then, between fifteen hundred and twenty-five [{182}] hundred feet, have been found the best for tuberculosis patients, and they are very pleasant during the summer time, though never without the chilly discomfort of the drop in temperature. During the fall and winter, however, many patients become tired out trying to react to these variations of temperature and want to seek other climates where they will not have to submit to the discomfort and the chilly feelings. If they come down to more comfortable quarters before their tuberculosis has been brought to a standstill by the increase of their resistive vitality, it is very probable that they will lose most of the benefit that they derived from their mountain experience. Here is where the will comes in. Those who have the will to do it and the persistence to stick at it and the character that keeps them in good humor in spite of the discouraging circumstances which almost inevitably develop from time to time, will almost without exception recover from their tuberculosis with comparatively little difficulty, if they have only taken up the treatment before the disease is so far advanced as to be beyond cure.