Word: tonsil
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Doctors used to snip out tonsils right & left. They thought that the tonsils did no good, that large tonsils were always infected, that infected tonsils could cause all manner of serious diseases, so they were "better out." The operation was supposed to be so trivial that any physician could do it in his office. The result, for a generation or so, was "the massacre of the tonsil...
Buzz-Bomb. In Kingston, Jamaica, when E. M. Mamby yawned, a wasp zoomed down his throat, stung a tonsil...
...American Child Health Association made a tonsil study of 1,000 eleven-year-old children in New York City. Some 61% of them had already had their tonsils removed. A group of doctors who examined the other 39% solemnly advised that nearly half of them needed tonsillectomies. The exonerated half were examined by a second group of doctors, and nearly half of them were culled for tonsil removal. After a third examination by still another panel, there remained only 65 children of the original thousand whose tonsils were rated sound...
...association found little rhyme or reason in the doctors' decisions.* Dr. Bakwin seconds the association's conclusion that the current craze for tonsil removal "represents in the main a useless ' expenditure of time, effort and money." Further, he considers it responsible for many cases of pneumonia, bulbar poliomyelitis, deaths from overdoses of anesthetics (80 a year) and children's neuroses...
...harbors organisms of trench mouth, may develop the disease if his resistance gets too low from poor nutrition or a bender. Then a bacillus and a spirochete (and sometimes other mouth germs) work together to produce tender, bleeding gums (medical name: Vincent's stomatitis) or throat and tonsil infections (medical name: Vincent's angina). Mouthwashing with hydrogen peroxide is one of the commonest treatments. But treatment usually goes on & on in serious cases...