View report page

16
treatments. No charges are made to bona-fide residents
of the Borough. Cases are only accepted on the recommendation
of their private doctor, and are seen in the first
instance by the consultant, who prescribes the clinic treatment
and advises the patient's doctor regarding home
treatment.
I am indebted to Dr. Francis Bach, consultant in
rheumatic diseases to the Red Cross Post for the following
note:—
" Many and varied forms of ill-health are included
in the term ' rheumatism.' It is only in recent years
that the medical profession has made a serious and
concerted effort to solve some of the major problems
which they set the community. The war, by causing
the mobilisation for industry of the less fit of the
young people and middle aged and even the elderly,
has shown how great is the pain caused to the individual
and the hours of work lost to the community by
the rheumatic diseases. Poverty, overcrowding, malnutrition,
lack of sunshine, are important factors in
the causation of rheumatism in childhood, and their
elimination is followed by a marked reduction in the
number of children crippled with rheumatic heart
disease. Similar factors, with the addition of physical
and psychological fatigue, play a big role in the
rheumatoid type of arthritis, which so often is still
recognised too late in its course when it has attacked
and already crippled the young industrial worker.
Other forms of rheumatism although they do not
damage the heart, as in juvenile rheumatism, or cripple
the joints, as in rheumatoid arthritis, cause long
periods of disablement by their effect on the muscles
and their fascial linings, such as fibrositis of the
shoulder leading to brachial neuralgia, and the lumbago
that if not treated leads to a prolonged and
painful ' sciatica.' In middle age, especially at the