Looking back at looking ahead 3

[xoxoxoBruce]

As I said in Home Base, I'm posting the section of a 1943 Mechanix Illustrated article called, "How Your Daily Life Will Be Changed After the War". This is the section on how they saw the future of medicine.

To insure your zestful enjoyment of new foods and fashions, medicine is keeping pace with new weapons against illness.
Consider the atom-smasher or cyclotron, originally a complex instrument of physicists but now —like the X-ray of an earlier day—developing into a health tool of inestimable possibilities. Mineral atoms bombarded in the cyclotron become temporarily radio-active (that is. give off the same rays as radium). They can thus be followed through the body like tracer bullets, revealing how the body builds and repairs itself and utilizes vital minerals from foods.

It’s like swallowing an X-ray machine to take these radio-active atoms into the body. Different radio-active atoms have varying lives, so you can swallow one week’s or two weeks’ radiation as you choose. Different elements flock to specific body organs. For instance, your thyroid gland has a voracious appetite for iodine. This gland sits astride your windpipe, controls your energy output and is the seat of goiter when things go wrong. In experiments with dogs, radio-activated iodine has dissected thyroid glands completely. Thus it is possible to drink a surgical operation in a tasteless glass of water containing such atoms—painless and bloodless liquid knives.

Radium and X-rays are used in treating cancer because their radiation is more destructive to malignant than to healthy tissue. But they are difficult to apply to some deep-seated tumors and there is hope that atom-smashed minerals can be made to carry radiation internally right to the site of trouble. Your bones and teeth are rich in calcium and phosphorus. This has led to striking experimental treatment of leukemia, a disease sometimes called cancer of the blood because the white corpuscles multiply malignantly.

The blood-making factories of the body are located in the long bones, for which phosphorus has an affinity. Why not, scientists reasoned, feed radio-active phosphorus to leukemia victims? In theory, it should lodge in the bones and bombard the viciously multiplying white cells with destructive radiation. In actual cases the theory has proved sound. Cures have not yet been effected but symptoms have been controlled and life prolonged, lifting the curtain on a brand new method of treating disease.

Fantastic possibilities are concealed in the electron microscope, which magnifies 150,000 times instead of the 2,500 diameters possible with the best light microscopes. Relatively gigantic portraits have already revealed that some germs are surrounded by a curious filmy capsule whose existence had never been suspected. Methods of penetrating this capsule and destroying germs may well lead to entirely new germicides, such as gramicidin and pencillin, obtained from the soil, which are hundreds of times more potent than ordinary germ-killers. The General Electric Company has just designed a refinement of the electron microscope which makes the bulky machine portable and within reach of the average physician. Disease diagnosis in the future may well include not only X-ray pictures but electron portraits as well.

X-rays themselves have recently been stepped up in power so that they can penetrate an inch of steel in a millionth of a second. One such instrument of the Western Electric Laboratories will make it possible for physicians to view bones and organs in motion. A General Electric tube called the “induction electron accelerator” produces X-rays equal in intensity to 1,000 grams of radium—more refined radium than exists in the whole world! And neutron beams provide a new form of radiation even more penetrating than X-rays.

Tuberculosis may finally be wiped from the face of the earth by the new technique of photographing fluoroscope screens. Such screens give lifesize shadows of the lungs, and the cost of making photographs of these shadows is now so low that the procedure can become standard in routine physical examinations. Especially in school children and younger folk, tuberculosis lesions can be detected and cured long before they produce outward symptoms.

Light itself has important germ-killing properties when it comes from the short or ultra-violet end of the spectrum. The Westinghouse Sterilamp, a long narrow tube, produces such rays and destroys many disease-causing germs in the air. It reduces operating room infections remarkably prevents cross-infection of children in nurseries, and works just as well in the home. It is hoped that it will soon be effective against viruses, which means that with a few lamps in the home you can annihilate the organisms of colds, influenza, and infantile paralysis that visitors may bring into the house.

Ultra-violet rays can also be piped into the body passages. They travel through the twists and bends of a fused quartz rod like water through a main. Infections resistant to other treatment respond to ultra-violet radiation of the blood Doctors take a little blood out of your body, irradiate it for 10 seconds, and re-inject it to attack germs like Montgomery after Rommel.

Hay fever is caused by pollens, which are special kinds of dust particles. The Precipitron is an electrical device which removes such particles from the air, capturing them on a metal plate from which they can be discarded like dirt from a vacuum cleaner. Lung troubles are minimized by the air-cleaning Precipitron for many kinds of germs are hitch-hikers on dust particles.

You feel peppy or listless according to the ionization of air in the room. This is controllable by electric devices and you may be able to banish fatigue by turning on a switch. The chemical composition of the air you breathe will be con-rolled to desired degrees of refreshing stimulation. Air-conditioning units also help to filter out undesirable noises, and soundproofing will be further effected by building room walls to slant slightly upward, tossing noises against absorbent insulation. This is more important than it sounds for one of the most potent though least suspected causes of chronic fatigue, it has been discovered, is noise.

That old terror, the dentist’s drill, may lose its sting when we learn to apply the newly established fact that minute amounts of fluorine tend to prevent tooth decay. The mineral could well be added to central water supplies in correct amounts. A mouth wash and a chewing gum, now being prepared for the market, claim to minimize tooth decay by inhibiting the action of certain types of bacteria known to favor dental caries.

Dishes can be made permanently sterile by mixing ionized copper or silver in plastic mediums that harden when applied to plates and tumblers. The minerals are gradually released from the surface in infinitesimal amounts, just sufficient to kill bacteria in from one to five minutes. Many diseases are transmitted by carelessly washed utensils.

Sulfa drugs, powerful as they are in treating many infections once considered hopeless, are now seen to be merely the beginning of a new art of chemotherapy as chemists experiment with different atomic combinations. Metal fragments imbedded deep in the body can easily be spotted by the surgeon who has a Berman locator, a wand-like device which, moving over the body’s surface, gives an electric signal when it detects a buried piece of metal. It was first used at Pearl Harbor on the day of infamy.

Instead of drinking bitter medicine, you will be able to rub it on the skin and absorb it painlessly. Substances known as “penetrasols” have been discovered which penetrate the skin and carry such medicaments as sulfa drugs with them.

Then there are the amino acids which, as we have already seen, make such things as wool suits and fur coats They are even more important to your personal economy. Scientists are beginning to suspect that they are more important than vitamins, which have been greatly overemphasized at the expense of other vital food elements.

Lack of just one amino acid, tryptophane, causes animals to grow bald and makes them incapable of progeny. It is only a matter of months since purified amino acids have become largely available for experiment. Unquestionably they play a vital role in many obscure ailments and you are going to hear more about them—especially if they become available in tablets and win a name that appeals to the imagination like “vitamins.”

After all, from the chemist’s point of view, you ere merely a chemical machine. What you are, what you wear, what you eat, is merely a matter of the proper atoms in the proper combination. In the brave days to come your atoms will be well cared for and life will be the better for it.

Sulfur drugs and penicillin were the cutting edge but they had big ambitions. They still do but now it's profits. Not bashing the Doctors that are doing good every day, it's the Drug companies, Insurance companies and health care system(business) that had screwed the pooch....and us. The Doctors are being used and abused also.

[Elspode]

Profit and wealth derived from profit are the only values which are unswervingly pursued these days. Humanity and decency have as much affect on the course of commerce as does a micrometeroid on the course of a galaxy.

[Cloud]

well, I'm not going to disagree with your statement that health care is in a mess--it is. I thought the article had several interesting tidbits. "radium to cure cancer" (shudder)--but they do use that idea when they make you drink barium or whatever to parse your insides. Light therapy has therapeutic uses. Tuberculosis is almost wiped out in this country due to vaccination.

[xoxoxoBruce]

He was right about some things although the inside out x-ray is crazy. But they didn't know that then. Modern medicine is relatively young. Current medicine is an infant. 90% of what Doctors know has been discovered since this article was written.

[jinx]

Originally Posted by Cloud

Tuberculosis is almost wiped out in this country due to vaccination.

Where are you cloud?
In the US, the BCG vaccine is not used because its efficacy has not been proven sufficient (estimated at 70-80%). In 2004 the US experienced 5 cases of TB per 100,000. In the UK on the other hand, where children are routinely given the BCG vaccine, they experienced 12 cases of TB per 100,000 in the same year.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Wow, 5 per 100,000, I'm surprised. No reason to doubt your numbers, I just don't remember ever hearing of someone I knew catching it.
I wonder how many people I knew had it, but they (and I) didn't know it?

[Deuce]

My son was exposed, had to take a six month course of medication. He was non-contatgious, but it was unsettling to know them li'l bugs were living in the house with all of us.

[Pie]

I've been exposed, too. I hated the drugs -- left a funny taste in my mouth, and I couldn't (!) drink. I tested positive during grad school, but it's impossible to know when I was exposed. I was born in Malaysia, and spent a couple of years (cumulative) in India at various points.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by jinx

Where are you cloud?
In the US, the BCG vaccine is not used because its efficacy has not been proven sufficient (estimated at 70-80%). In 2004 the US experienced 5 cases of TB per 100,000. In the UK on the other hand, where children are routinely given the BCG vaccine, they experienced 12 cases of TB per 100,000 in the same year.

The BCG is no longer offered routinely in schools (you are correct in that it was in 2004). Students are now risk assessed to see whether the vaccine should be used.

Interestingly, many of the TB cases in the last few years would not have been prevented by the across the board vaccination anyway, as they oringated overseas.

From here:

... The highest proportion of cases - 38% - were reported among people from an Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic background.
[snip]
"This suggests that the increase is not a result of a large number of individuals arriving recently with TB but rather a combination of TB disease developing in individuals who may have been infected for some time and new infections acquired in the UK, or as a result of travel to other countries where TB is common."
[snip]
People applying to come to the UK for six months or more must get a certificate giving them the all clear from an accredited clinic in their country.

Also anyone appearing ill or complaining of illness is examined at some airports. Heathrow has three X-ray machines and Gatwick one.

TB is something that's quite high on the agenda here in Leicester as we have both a high immigrant population, also a a high number of 2nd and 3rd generation families that return to India & Pakistan on regular visits. We also have some deprived areas where people are living below the offcially recognised poverty line. This puts Leicester on a high risk for TB. In fact the last serious school outbreak in the UK (254 infected pupils) occurred here in 2001.