The traveling-man reported the following day that he had enjoyed a good night’s sleep—the first for many nights—and after forty-eight hours of this treatment he telephoned that all pain and sensitiveness had completely disappeared.
In neuralgia and other painful conditions of long standing, where there are no decayed teeth—or other dental causes for the pain—many permanent cures have been effected by pressure treatment. Almost it would seem that whatever tends to reduce the pain would also help remedy its cause, no matter how remote.
As illustrating, in detail, the successful “home treatment” of neuralgia, another case of Dr. Roemer’s is most interesting. The Doctor says “I saw recently a patient with tri-facial neuralgia of two years’ standing. Nothing had relieved permanently. The attack which brought him to me was of four or five days’ duration. During this time he had been unable to eat. Even the attempt to speak would bring on an acute paroxysm of pain of a sharp piercing nature, which radiated over the entire left side of the face, extending from the lower and the upper jaw, and up into the left eye. These paroxysms left him as ‘limp as a rag.’
“He had been advised to have the nerve cut, as offering the only relief for his trouble.
“I applied rubber bands on the joints nearest the tip of the thumb and forefinger of the left hand. In less than ten minutes my patient was talking and laughing, and we had quite a visit.
“I told him nothing about what was being attempted with the bands, so he wasn’t ‘hypnotized.’ After we saw results, however, I instructed him to apply the bands every half hour if the pain continued, and as it decreased to lengthen the interval of the applications.
“When next I saw him, several days after, he laughingly said, ‘Oh, I apply the rubbers once a day now, as I don’t want that pain to come back.’ He is now enjoying life better than he has for years, thanks to ‘those fool rubber bands,’ as his daughter called them.”
Many dentists secure a very satisfactory degree of analgesia—sufficient for excavating or treatments—by compressing firmly the lip or cheek immediately over the tooth that is to be worked upon. (See Fig. [27].) But as a rule, for extraction purposes, they prefer pressure over the roots, or directly upon the various branches of the dental nerves. (See Figs. [25] and 26.)
