Antidepressants Blog

The disease-producing bacteria are not as the sea sands, but I think that almost everybody will agree that there are too many of them. It would be futile to try even to mention them all. My medical dictionary takes about four pages to list them. What I should say are the most common, or at least best-known, ones are the staphylococci and streptococci. The first are so called because they are found in clusters like bunches of grapes; and the second, in strings. As a working rule the first may be expected to form local lesions such as abscesses, and the second are more likely to spread rapidly. This distinction is not to be relied upon, however; any of them may run wild at times. If we see pus collecting about a fingernail we presume that it is due to staphylococci. If a surgeon pricks his finger with a needle while operating and a few hours later little or nothing is to be seen where the needle point went in, but red streaks are running up his arm and tender swellings are to be felt at his elbow or armpit, we fear that he has streptococci infection. The red streaks are due to infection and inflammation along the lymphatic vessels and the tender lumps are the lymph nodes attempting to stop the infection there. The first abscess may be opened and pus freed, with relief. Surgery will probably accomplish nothing in the latter case.

But all the infectious organisms have their own characteristic ways of attacking us. Typhoid goes at our intestines; pneumococci usually settle in the lungs; and diphtheria causes a membrane to form in the throat. All these villains cause acute conditions, but others, such as tuberculosis or syphilis, go slowly about their evil ways. We may not even know when they first attack us, but later, when fully established, they reveal themselves as difficult or even impossible to banish.

Nowadays these diseases are treated often with considerable efficiency; and many of the treaters talk much of curing them, for probably the most popular idea about overcoming infection in the human body is that the giving of some medicine will kill the infection. If there are potato bugs on your vines you sprinkle on Paris green and this kills the bugs.   If there is infection in the human body you give medicine and this kills the bacteria. There are many troubles about this latter procedure.

Medicines which are supposed to kill off bacteria often do not do too much good to the life of the body. Many diseases are insidious in onset and do much harm before we realize what we are fighting. There are many bacteria and they do not all respond to the same antibiotics. Even different strains of the same kind of bacteria are affected by different antibiotics. Now we are finding out that the bacteria are learning how to resist the antibiotics and we are not always so successful in killing them off as at first.

It is not at all certain that any of these wonder drugs kill off infection by hitting the bugs on the head, as it were. The forces of the body itself probably do the actual destruction. According to this theory, all that penicillin does to the streptococci is to make them more digestible so that the body devours them more successfully. The best chance for man to survive disease is to have an immunity. We are not so smart as we thought we were in licking disease after it has been established in our bodies.

*85/276/5*

GENERAL HEALTH