Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/507

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The numbers of other defects are too small to be of use for comparative purposes. The table shows that eye troubles receive treatment in 55 to 90 per cent, of cases and that adenoids and tonsils are attended to in from 63 to 100 per cent, of cases. Evidently special stress, at times too much stress, is being laid on this class of defects. It is instructive to note that at times with full cooperation of the school authorities it is possible to attain 100 per cent, of treatments in certain classes of ailments. Teeth present the poorest showing as to amount of attention and treatment given, even in the well-to-do section of the city.

As has been already mentioned, reported treatment and actual results should be regarded as two distinct statistical categories. Under existing conditions, figures of treatments should be taken with great reservation as an indication of efficiency of results attained by medical inspection of school children. The school health records indicate the number of cases which in the opinion of the school doctor were cured or which improved under the reported treatment. Tabulating these statistics, I find as far as the cases are reported that, exclusive of teeth, out of 482 cases treated only 204, or 42.3 per cent., have been cured, and 96 cases, or 20 per cent, have improved. The remaining 37 per cent, are not recorded as cured or improved. Granting that among the defective children under treatment there were a number of incurable cases, and allowing for clerical errors of omission, 38 or 30 or even 25 per cent, of non-cures and nonimprovements in school children is a very high percentage. Aside from mere figures, experience shows that a large percentage of those reported treated do not improve, a condition which calls for serious consideration and which is due in a large measure to slipshod therapeutics in dispensaries as well as by some private physicians, especially in the poorer sections of the city.

Contrary to the prevailing notion of the abuse of dispensaries by patients able to afford a physician's fee, the statistics for the four schools as to source of treatment, show that 235 of the 482 cases treated for defects other than teeth went to consult physicians and only 228 made use of dispensaries. The remaining 19 are not accounted for.