Treatment of a Cold on the Chest by G. H. HEALD, M. D.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 4, 1912

Treatment of a Cold on the Chest

By G. H. HEALD, M. D.

G. H. HEALD, M. D.

TAKE it in hand immediately. The very first symptom should be a call to arms. Every half-hour that the cold is allowed to proceed, increases the difficulty of breaking it up. Do not put it off until you have filled certain engagements, but attend to it at once. Empty the bowels. This is always good treatment in any cold, and in almost any acute sickness.

The sweating treatment as recommended for cold in the head, in the December 21 issue, is applicable here.

Some recommend staying in bed from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This may be good in some cases if the cold is due primarily to exposure, and the treatment is begun early enough. If it is due to sedentary habits, a vigorous run or walk in the cold bracing air may be a proper procedure. This, of course, should not be preceded by hot treatment. The writer once caught a severe cold, because of being all day in a very much overheated house. Outside it was slushy. In leaving the office he had to wade, with thin shoes and no rubbers, in soft snow. With his feet as wet as if dipped in a pail of water, and himself “frozen to the marrow,” as it seemed to him, he had to sit at a junction in an unheated room and wait half an hour for a car. The surprising thing to him was that instead of contracting pneumonia as he expected, he reached home with every trace of his cold gone,—frozen out! He does not recommend the treatment to others.

On the whole, perhaps the best procedure is, after a hot treatment, to remain in bed, in a moist warm room, until the attack is over. For local treatment one may rub the chest with camphorated oil,—olive-oil in which camphor is dissolved. Fomentations should be applied to the chest, followed by a cold compress. A mustard plaster to the chest, as a counter-irritant, at the first will do much to allay the inflammation.

Onion is a good expectorant. The oil of onion is absorbed into the blood and excreted in the air-passages, as any one can testify who comes near one who has eaten onions. Sometimes the free eating of mild onions, like the Bermuda, seems to act like magic in the breaking of an incipient cold. The oil of the onion may act not only as an expectorant, that is, to loosen the phlegm, but it may actually have a germicidal action. Garlic acts in the same way. Needless to say, the patient should be quarantined on account of his onion as well as on account of his cold.

Licorice is another mild expectorant, and for this reason acts well in influencing the progress of cough.

Turpentine, oil of tar, and various balsams inhaled in vapor from boiling water, or by means of an inhaler or atomizer, also act as expectorants, and in this way relieve irritation; for most of the irritation comes from the ineffectual dry coughing.

An atomizer with a solution containing tincture of benzoin with perhaps some other ingredients, as oil of Scotch pine, pine tar, etc., may prove beneficial.