Counseling Sheet

H. F. Rand, M.D.
Superintendent
St. Helena Sanitarium

Nearly every one who attempts hydrotherapy in this disease uses hot water. This reduces the number of white blood cells, and lessens their activity, and also reduces the alkalinity of the blood. Thus the leucocytes of the blood are prevented or hindered in the work of destroying the parasites. Instead of doing this, the right thing to do is to increase the number and activity of the cells, and keep up the alkalinity of the blood.

We gave these patients a cool half-bath about ten hours before the chill was due, following this with other cold treatments at intervals. The men from the medical school were there to watch the results. They watched for the chill to come, but it did not come. We used other cool treatments and kept them up. Together we treated these cases for a week. All that was required in the treatment was hydrotherapy, and it was successful from the beginning.

There was another case that they had been treating in their way for nearly two weeks. The man had been taking quinine and other medicines. The doctors told him it would probably be three to four months before he would be well. They knew that the malarial parasites could resist their medicines, and live in spite of them. This case was more reduced than the others had been. We used cold mitten friction, beginning about the same number of hours before the chill was expected each time and the chills kept coming further and further apart, until finally they ceased in about a week.

Just recently in California, we have had two gentlemen suffering from this disease, who had taken large quantities of quinine. As soon as they came, we began giving the cold mitten friction every two hours, with hot and cold to the spine, to tone up the nervous system. We were careful with the diet, in order to keep the alimentary tract in as normal a condition as possible; and in two or three days the chills were completely obliterated, and the patients improved very fast. We used no quinine at all. The examination of the blood in one week showed no trace of the plasmodia. - Life and Health, August, 1909.