“CROWING PAINS."

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXIIII, Issue 3625, 11 September 1912, Page 7

“CROWING PAINS."

DOCTOR’S 'WARNING FOR HAREMS.

There is a prevalent belief that growing pains are a necessary accompaniment of the growth of children, and parents show too little concern for juvenile pain, which they can set down as “growing pain.” Now, pain cannot exist without a cause, and socalled growing pains are usually an undeveloped form of rheumatism or rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is the great cause of heart disease, for the rheumatic poison attacks the fibrous structures of the valves of the heart as readily as it invades the fibrous structures of joints. In children „the disease lias a special liability to damage the valves of the heart; in adults more often it expends its force upon the joints.

No disease demands complete rest in bed more imperatively than rheumatic fever. If implication of the valves of the heart is to be escaped, the work of the heart must be lightened by absolute rest in bed. But a child with growing pains is not only allowed to he up, and is sent out to play in all weathers, but may lie told to ‘ 'run about and work it off”; whilst the child’s diet knows no restrictions but those of appetitie and the plenitude of the household larder. Under such circumstances, is there any wonder that the rheumatic poison spreads and multiplies, in-' vades the body and cripples it at its most vulnerable part, the heart ! J Many a case of incurable heart disease has owed its origin to overlooked or slighted ‘‘growing pains.” Then growing pains may bo due to rickets or commencing tubercular disease of the bones. It is only necessary to visit the children’s ward of a hospital to realise the demand these two affections make on’the always full beds. These diseases rarely begin suddenly. Growing pains may he the sign of their onset—the too oiten neglected danger signal. It is during the growing pain stage that treatment has the best chance of success. If treatment were adopted during the growing pain stage there would be fewer abscesses, fewer operations, fewer mutilated limbs, fewer worn, pale-faced little cripples, dragging out a. weary existence till death, the comforter, comes to end their sufferings. Pain in growing bone means an excess of activity in the process of growth, and this over-activity may be spurred into actual disease by improper treatment, or by what is the same thing, want of attention. Children, whatever their other faults and foibles, are not malingerers. They chafe under confinement too uneasily to incur the restraint of an illness; and their frail bodies and sensitive nerves shrink from pain too much to counterfeit it.

It is a rule to which there must be no exception, that pain in a child means something which is not natural. No case of growing pain should ever be disregarded. Rost, complete rest, is the chief remedy; and if, as is often the case, the child is kept awake by the pain, it is sometimes quite relieved by being transferred to the cold sheets of a cool bed which has not been slept in.