Injuries of nerves and their consequences - Reflex Sympathetic ...

TREATMENT. 251
lumbar pain and cephalalgia, or nausea, and possibly
great exhaustion but when the ; remedy has not been
overused, the patient feels refreshed, and is sure to sleep
the better for the process.
For atrophy and muscular palsy, a treatment by electricity
three or four times a week, by daily massage, with
local hot baths to precede each sitting, seems to me to
fulfill all the needed indications.
Strychnia.— In old cases, I see a good physiological reason
for giving strychnia also, because it is probable that
when a group of spinal ganglia has been long unused,
it
may need the special increase of irritability which this
potent agent produces.
I have many times employed strychnia by hypodermic
injections into the limb, but as yet I have had none of the
brilliant results which a few observers have obtained, nor
can I conceive of any physiological grounds upon which
we might reasonably hope for a greater utility from injections
into the palsied part 'than from those made elsewhere.
Deformities from
—
changes in the muscles. While we are
thus wisely using every means of keeping up the organic
life of the limb, in a large number of cases, and despite our
efforts, changes aft'ecting mobility are taking place which
I have elsewhere fully described. The muscles which remain
healthy being no longer compensated by their
antagonists, gradually stretch these until they cause some
deformity, which alters the forms of the articulations, and
is productive of the most permanent mischief when the
joints are at the same time suffering from the inflammations
so common in neural iujuries.
A still more troublesome cause of shortening in muscles
is the organic shrinking which takes place, either
with or after atrophy. This occasionally counterbalances
the precedent shortening which has been due to the