Myocardial Disturbances
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Disturbances Of The Heart
While the myocardium is the most important muscle structure of the
body, it has but recently been studied carefully or well understood
clinically or pathologically. A heart was "hypertrophied" or
"dilated" or perhaps "fatty." It suffered from "pain," "angina
pectoris," from some "serious weakness" or from "coronary disease,"
and that ended the pathology and the clinical diagnosis. This is the
age of heart defects; no o
e can understand a patient's condition
now, whatever ails him, without studying his heart. No one can treat
a patient properly now without considering the management of the
circulation. No one should administer a drug now without considering
what it will do to the patient's heart.
Although we are scientifically interested in the administration of
specific treatments, antitoxins and vaccines; although we have a
better understanding of food values, and order diets with more
careful consideration of the exact needs of the individual, and
although we are using various physical methods to promote
elimination of toxins, poisons and products of metabolism, we have
until lately forgotten the physical fact that one thirteenth of the
weight of a normal adult is blood. A man who weighs 170 pounds has
13 pounds of blood. This proportion is not true in the obese, and is
not true in children. Whether the person is sick in bed, miserable
though up and about, or beginning to feel the first sensations of
slight incapacity for his life work, his ability properly to
circulate this one thirteenth of his weight through the various
arterial and venous channels and capillary tracts must, with the
increasing tension and speed of our lives, be taken into
consideration.
The more and more frequently repeated statements that the operation
was successfully performed but that the patient died of shock, and
that the typhoid fever and the pneumonia were being successfully
combated, but that the patient died of heart failure, together with
the increase in arteriosclerosis, cardiac disturbances and renal
disease, emphatically present the necessity of more carefully
studying the circulation. A better understanding and the constant
study of the blood pressure shows nothing but the necessity of the
age. The unwillingness of the patient to suffer pain, even for a few
minutes, without some narcotic, generally a cardiac debilitating
drug, means that, if he is a sufferer from chronic or recurrent
pain, he has taken a great deal of medicine which has done his heart
no good. Repeated high tension of life raises the blood pressure and
puts more work on the heart. Therefore the heart is found weary, if
not actually degenerated, when any serious accident, medical or
surgical, happens to the patient.
The requirements of the age have, then, necessitated that the heart
be more carefully studied, and therefore the heart strength and its
disturbances are better understood. The mere determination as to
where the apex beat is located, and as to what murmurs may be
present is not sufficient; we must attempt to determine the probable
condition of the myocardium. The following conditions are
recognized: (1) acute myocarditis, (2) chronic myocarditis
(fibrosis, cardiosclerosis), (3) fatty degeneration, and (4) fatty
heart.