Preventable Diseases

by Woods Hutchinson

In another great group of headaches natural poisons or waste-products are not burned up or got rid of through the body-sewers and pores as rapidly as they should be; for instance, the familiar headache from sitting too long in a stuffy room. Your well-known and well-earned discomfort is, of course, due in part to the irritating and often poisonous gases, dust, and bacteria, which are present in the air of an unventilated room; but it is also due to the steady piling up of the waste products of your own tissues. These poisons are normally oxidized in the muscles, burned up and exhaled through the lungs, and sweated out through the skin,—all three of which relief agencies are, of course, practically paralyzed, or working at lowest possible level, while you are sitting at your desk.

The well-known headache of sluggish bowels is an obvious case in point; and one of the early signs of beginning failure of the kidneys, as in Bright's disease, is a headache of a peculiar type due to accumulation in the system of the poisons which it is their duty to get rid of.

There are few things the head resents more keenly than loss of sleep. The pillow is the best headache medicine. If this loss of sleep be due to the encroachments of work or of amusements, then the mechanism of its production is obvious. The fatigue poisons produced during the day and normally completely neutralized and burned up during sleep are not entirely disposed of and remain in the tissues to torture the nerves. The headache of insomnia, or habitual sleeplessness, on the other hand, is not, strictly speaking, caused by loss of sleep. Paradoxical as it may sound, the fatigue poisons, which in moderate amounts will produce drowsiness and promote sleep, in excessive amounts will cause wakefulness and inability to sleep. Insomnia and headache are usually symptoms of this overfatigued, or poisoned, condition, and should both be regarded and treated as symptoms by the removal of their causes, not by the use of coal-tar products and hypnotics.

Another common cause of headache is nasal obstruction, such as may be due to adenoids or deformities of the septum, or chronic catarrhal conditions. These probably act by their interference with breathing and consequent imperfect ventilation of the blood, as well as by obstruction and inflammation of the great air-spaces in the bones of the skull, closely underlying the brain, which open and drain into the nose.

It may be remarked in passing that "sick headache," or migraine, though long and painfully familiar to us, is still a puzzle as to its cause. But the view which seems to come nearest to explaining its many eccentricities is that it is usually due to a congenital defect, not so much of the nervous system as of the entire body, by which the poisons normally produced in its processes fail to be neutralized and got rid of, and gradually accumulate until they saturate the system to such a degree as to produce a furious explosion of pain. This defect may quite possibly be in one of the ductless glands or in some of the internal secretions, rather than in the nervous system.

Obviously, after what has been said of the world-wide causation of headache, to attempt to discuss its treatment would be as absurd as to undertake to advise what should be done for the relief of hunger, for "that tired feeling," or for a pain in the knee. The treatment for a headache due to an inflammation or tumor of the brain would, of course, be wide as the poles from that which would relieve an ordinary fatigue or indigestion pain. Besides, it is utterly irrational and often harmful to attempt to treat any headache as such. That is the open road to the morphine habit and drug addictions of all sorts. Remedies—and there are plenty of them—which simply relieve the pain without doing anything to remove its cause, merely make the latter state of that individual worse than the first. Headache is always and everywhere nature's vivid warning that something is going wrong, like the shrieking of a wagon-axle or the clatter of a broken cog in machinery.

There is, however, fortunately one remedy which alone will cure ninety-nine per cent of all headaches, and that is rest. The first thing an intelligent machinist does when squeaking or rattling begins is to stop the machinery. This has the double advantage of preventing the damage from going any further and of enabling him to get at the cause. Headache, like pain anywhere, is nature's imperative order to Halt, at least long enough to find out what you are doing to yourself that you shouldn't. It makes little difference what you take for your headache, so long as you follow it up by lying down for an hour or two, or, better still, by going to bed for the remainder of the day and sleeping through until the next morning. If more headaches were treated in this way there would not only be fewer headaches, but two-thirds of the risks of nervous breakdown, collapse, insomnia, and chronic degenerative changes in the liver, kidneys, and blood-vessels would be avoided.

This, of course, is a counsel of perfection, and incapable of general application for the sternest of reasons; but it does indicate the rational attitude toward headache and its treatment, and one which is coming to be more and more adopted. No motorist would dream of pushing ahead with a shrieking axle or a scorching hot box, unless his journey were one of most momentous importance or a matter of life and death. Pain is nature's automatic speed regulator. It is often necessary to disregard it, to get the work of the world done and to discharge our sacred obligations to others; but this disregarding should not be exalted to too high a pinnacle of virtue, and least of all worshiped as inherently and everywhere a mark of piety and one of the insignia of saintship.

A business firm or a factory, for instance, which would send home for the day each of its employees who reported a genuine case of bad headache, would, in the long run, save money by avoiding accidents, mistakes, muddles, and confusions, often involving a whole department, due to the kind of work that is done by a man or woman who is physically unfit to attempt it. And the higher the type of work that has to be done, the more the elements of insight, grasp, and sound judgment enter into it, the graver and costlier are the mistakes that are likely to be made under such circumstances.

Of course, it will probably be objected at this point: "What is the use of wasting a day, or even half a day, when by taking two or three capsules of So-and-So's Headache Cure I can get rid of the pain and go right on with my work?" It is perfectly true that there are a number of remedies which will relieve the average headache; but there are two important things to be borne in mind. The first is that all of these are simply weaker or stronger nerve-deadeners; most of them actual narcotics. All that they do is to stop the pain and thus cheat you into the impression that you are better. You are just as tired and as unfit for work as you were before. Your nervous system is just as saturated with poisons, and the chances are ten to one that the quality of the work that you do will be just as bad as if you had taken no medicine. Further, like alcohol, when used as a "pick-me-up" under somewhat similar conditions, the remedy which you have taken, while producing a false sense of comfort and even exhilaration by deadening your pain and discomfort, in that very process itself takes off the finer edge of your judgment, the best keenness of your insight, and the highest balance of your control. In short, your nervous system has to struggle with all the poisons that were present before, with another one added to them!