Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why Part 35

"It seems to me that the field of usefulness of alcohol in therapeutics is extremely limited and possibly does not exist at all. Probably every supposed indication for its use can be met better and more safely by other drugs. The recent work on the so-called food value of alcohol is the subject of much misunderstanding. While it is true that under some circ.u.mstances, for example, after a person has acquired a certain degree of tolerance to its poisonous effects, alcohol seems to act as a food in the sense that fats and carbohydrates do, I believe this to be at present a matter of little more than theoretical importance."--DR. REID HUNT, Chief of the Department of Pharmacology, Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, Washington, D.C.

"The physician should have blazoned before him, 'If you can do no good, do no harm.' If this rule is adhered to, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the physician will give no alcohol. In the medical wards of the Pennsylvania Hospital I have found that in acute as well as chronic disease we can do without alcohol.

It does harm rather than good. Alcohol masks the symptoms of disease, so that we cannot know the patient's real condition."--J. H. MUSSER, M. D., Philadelphia, Pa., Ex-President American Medical a.s.sociation.

"It is time alcohol was banished from the medical armamentarium; whisky has killed thousands where it cured one."--J. H.

MCCORMACK, M. D., Secretary Kentucky Board of Health, and Organizer for the American Medical a.s.sociation.

"I very rarely use alcohol in my practice. I think that its use is never essential. Physicians are using it less and less in the treatment of disease owing to the recognition that it is a narcotic, not a stimulant, and that other narcotics are usually better when a narcotic is required."--RICHARD C. CABOT, M. D., Professor of Clinical Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Ma.s.s.

"My position has been that alcohol should be prescribed with as much care as to indications and circ.u.mspection as to dose and method as in the use of any other drug that in health would prove harmful, as morphine, belladonna, aconite, quinine, etc. I believe strongly that in pneumonia, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis especially, the indiscriminate use of alcohol in the past has caused an incalculable amount of distress and needless disaster to suffering humanity."--HOWARD S. ANDERS, M.

D., Professor of Physical Diagnosis, Medico-Chirurgical College, Philadelphia, Pa.

"I do not think alcohol of any value in the treatment of disease; formerly it was used a great deal in the hospital wards, and 'liquor slips' were daily signed. Now, I never order liquor in any quant.i.ty, and at times for weeks I have not signed a single slip ordering liquor."--HENRY JACKSON, M. D., Professor in Harvard Medical School.

"In the overwhelming majority of cases I am in entire sympathy with the movement to abolish the routine use of alcoholics from medicine, and I rarely advise such in my practice."--EDWARD R.

BALDWIN, M. D., Saranac Lake Sanitarium, New York.

"I seldom prescribe alcohol."--GEORGE BLUMER, M. D., Yale Medical School, New Haven, Conn.

"WHEREAS, The study of alcohol from a scientific standpoint has demonstrated that its action is deceptive, and that it does not have the medical properties that we once claimed for it; now, therefore, be it

"_Resolved_, By the West Virginia State Medical a.s.sociation, That we deplore the fact that our profession has been quoted so long as claiming for it virtues which it does not possess, and that we earnestly pledge ourselves to discourage the use of it, both in and out of the sick room."--_Resolution pa.s.sed at annual meeting May, 1908._

"I have been actively engaged in the practice of medicine for nearly twenty-five years, in the early portion of which I prescribed alcoholics moderately but yet with considerable frequency. For the past ten years I have been finding professionally less place for alcoholics of any sort in my practise, and for perhaps three years I have scarcely ever prescribed them. I am satisfied that my cases of pneumonia and typhoid come through in better condition without anything alcoholic, even wines, and I no longer prescribe these at all in cases of tuberculosis. I have noted also that among my professional a.s.sociates of the thinking rather than of the automatic type, the medicinal use of alcohol is rapidly lessening."--C. G. HICKEY, M. D., Lecturer on Medicine, Denver and Gross College of Medicine, Denver, Colorado.

"In the thirteen years I have taught in Michigan I have not used alcohol in the treatment of disease in a routine way. Even alcoholic preparations, such as tinctures, have been used in very rare instances. I have occasion to speak on this subject every year to about two hundred students. My reasons for taking this stand are chiefly medical, though I am heartily in sympathy with the ethical and moral phases of the temperance movement."--DR. GEORGE DOCK, formerly Professor of Medicine, University of Michigan Medical College, now of Tulane University, New Orleans.

"Alcohol is distinctly a poison, and the limitation of its use should be as strict as that of any other kind of poison. It is not an appetizer, and even in small quant.i.ties it hinders digestion. The use of alcohol is emphatically diminishing in hospital practise."--SIR FREDERICK TREVES, Surgeon to King Edward.

"If during the last quarter of a century I have prescribed almost no alcohol in the treatment of disease, it is because I have found very little reason for its use, and it seemed to me that my patients got on better without it."--SIR JAMES BARR, Dean of the Medical School of Liverpool University.

"With the increase of medical knowledge and with the increase of medical observation, it is shown every year that the value of alcohol as a drug has been enormously overestimated. It is a very poor agent, and only in common use because it is so easily obtained. The medical profession is using it less and less, because they appreciate it now at its true value. Personally I never order it, because I believe patients recover better without it."--SIR VICTOR HORSLEY, Surgeon to London Hospital.

"The same care and discrimination should be given to the prescribing of alcohol as to the most deadly drug with which we have to deal. In looking at the report of Radcliffe Infirmary for the past month I see that in dealing with twenty-five cases I ordered alcohol costing exactly 1-3/4 pence."--DR. WILLIAM COLLIER, President British Medical a.s.sociation, 1904.

"In England at present the use of large doses of alcohol seems to have greatly gone out of hospital practise, and opinion is certainly growing that not even small doses are required.

Diseases of the stomach, liver, heart, and kidneys have appeared to me, in my practise, to be much more satisfactorily treated without beer, wines, or spirits."--DR. C. R. DRYSDALE, Consulting Physician to the Metropolitan Hospital, London.

"Alcohol is a functional and tissue poison, and there is no proper or necessary use for it as medicine."--DR. FRANK PAYNE, Vice-President London Pathological Society.

"Of scarlet fever I have treated some 2,000 cases. I have never seen a case in which, in my opinion, alcohol was necessary; no case in which its administration was beneficial; but I have seen more than one case in which its action was directly injurious. *

* * Alcohol in no case averts a fatal issue where such is impending. * * * The facts are dead against alcohol. In hospitals there has been an increase of 300 per cent. in the use of milk, and a decline of 47 per cent. in the use of alcohol.

Progress in treatment of disease has gone hand in hand with disuse of alcohol. The use of alcohol formerly was the outcome of ignorance, a confession of weakness and defeat; to-day it is the expression of inability to discard the fetters of an outworn routine."--DR. C. KNOX BOND, in Medical Times.

"For many years I have dispensed almost entirely with alcohol as an aid in surgical treatment. As a student I saw it used, almost as a matter of routine, for every kind of surgical malady except head injuries, and in my early years I naturally followed the practise of my teachers; but as soon as I made trial for myself of the effect of withholding alcohol, I found how entirely overrated its value was, and how gravely mistaken had been the teaching. It is commonly held, I believe, that alcoholic stimulants are of especial value in all forms of septic inflammation, such as erysipelas, pyaemia, septicaemia, and hectic fever. I believe that this belief is founded solely upon tradition unsupported by any trustworthy evidence, and untested by experiment or experience."--DR. A. PEARCE GOULD, F. R. C. S., Surgeon to the Middles.e.x Hospital, London.

"I have not prescribed alcohol to my patients for more than ten years, and can affirm positively that they have fared well under this change of treatment. Since I formerly followed the universal practice, I am competent to make comparisons, and these speak unconditionally in favor of treatment without alcohol. As a preventive of waste I use among fever patients nothing but real foods; in addition to milk, particularly sugar, which can be administered to any fever patient in ample quant.i.ty in the form of fruit juices, stewed fruit, sweet lemonade, fruit ices, sugared tea, etc., concerning which hundreds of investigations have demonstrated positively that it prevents the waste of both alb.u.men and fat. As a stimulant I employ, besides hydriatic methods, which at the same time abstract heat, almost nothing but camphor, and I can affirm that it is unconditionally preferable to alcohol for its prompt results and the absence of disagreeable after-effects (intoxication, benumbing). Pneumonia, especially, subsides without alcohol to perfect satisfaction, and I rejoice to agree in this respect with Aufrecht, one of the best authorities on this disease, who in his monograph in Nothnagle's manual, acknowledges himself hostile to the use of alcohol in the treatment of pneumonia, and hopes that its use may be speedily abolished. For the reasons previously specified, I should like to see that extended to all use of alcohol in therapeutics.

However, that can come to pa.s.s only when all thinking physicians clearly appreciate the fact that no substance is able to undertake the double role of a food and a poison, and, also, that for alcohol no nutritive, but only toxic properties can be claimed."--MAX Ka.s.sOWITZ, M. D., Professor in the University of Vienna, Austria.

"Besides its deleterious influence on the nervous system and other important parts of our body, alcohol has a harmful action on the phagocytes, the agents of natural defense against infective microbes."--PROF. METCHNIKOFF, Pasteur Inst.i.tute, Paris, France.

"Alcoholic liquors are, to my mind, not only not valuable, but distinctly disadvantageous, in the treatment of disease, except in rare instances, as for example in the initial chill of some acute infectious disease. However, I have almost given up the use of alcohol in the treatment of disease."--DR. D. L. EDSALL, Professor of Therapeutics in the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

"As a rule which might well be regarded as universal in the practice of medicine, alcohol in the treatment of disease is an evil. In ordinary doses and in continuous use the sum of its reactions increases exhaustion, which may terminate fatally."--DR. JOHN VAN DUYN, Professor of Medicine in Syracuse, N. Y., University Medical School.

"In sixteen years of active practice I have not used alcoholics at all. I am medical director of the Scranton Sanitarium, and I have considerable trouble in trying to cure those who use alcohol, and to undo some of the work my fellow pract.i.tioners have unwittingly made."--D. WEBSTER EVANS, M. D., Scranton, Pa.

"I am opposed to the use of alcoholic liquors as a beverage, and with rare exceptions, to their use in the treatment of diseases."--DR. EUGENE KERR, Physician to Phipps Dispensary, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Md.

"In my professional work I do not advise or permit the use of alcohol as a beverage or medicine in any form whatever. No alcohol is used medicinally in my hospital wards. Beer or wine is not permitted to convalescents. Children are never given tinctures. Cases of delirium tremens receive no alcohol. The hypodermic use of alcohol is not permitted in cases of shock.

There are other much more effective and less depressing diffusable stimulants.

"Among my colleagues the employment of alcohol as a medicine has diminished at least seventy-five per cent. in the past fifteen years.

"I have cast it out entirely."--J. P. WARBa.s.sE, M. D., Chief Surgeon German Hospital, Brooklyn, N. Y.

"The habitual use of alcohol in any disease is worse than harmful."--ROBERT B. PREBLE, M. D., Chicago, Ill.

"The last few years I find I have used less and less alcohol in prescribing for my patients until at the present time I use very little. I think my typhoid cases do better without alcohol than with it."--H. H. HEALY, M. D., former Sec'y North Dakota Board of Health.