Word: chronic
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...almost no story, but such story as there is is sieved through the mind of one person. The sieve in So Little Time is Jeffrey Wilson, a fiftyish, talented doctor of other people's ailing plays. Jeffrey is ailing himself, for he is troubled with a vague, chronic anxiety about the emptiness of contemporary U.S. life and the immediate prospect of far-reaching social changes...
...prescription for one of the prime problems of wartime medicine, too few doctors with too many civilian patients. The prescription offered by Dr. Alvarez in the A.M. A. Journal: dispose of patients faster by abler diagnosis. Its two chief ingredients: 1) distinguish between the really sick and the chronic complainers; 2) use a few. shrewd questions, which often yield a better diagnosis than elaborate laboratory tests...
They have no effect on many basic absenteeism causes-lack of anyone to care for children, sickness, bad transportation, stormy weather or simply need of rest. And chronic absentees balance the long chance of winning a prize against the sure shot of a day of loafing, and take the day. People who always worked regularly still...
...Urschel says that 48 out of 124 chronically ill patients had undulant fever (he uses skin tests as well as symptoms in diagnosis). The average chronic undulant fever patient had been sick three years, eight months. Both Drs. Urschel and Davis treat patients with undulant fever vaccine in small, gradually increasing injections, spread over several months; and both refuse to consider any patient cured, because relapses are fairly common...
Whether acute or chronic, the disease rarely kills anybody. But it often makes a patient wish he were dead. Between 11 and 20% of U.S. dairy cattle are infected with the undulant fever organism in one of its three forms. Most dangerous to man is Brucella suis. Experts used to guess that 10% of U.S. citizens were infected with Brucella and that 1% of those infected were ill with undulant fever at any one time. But the work of the Indiana doctors may eventually prove that there are many more than that...