Page:Guide to health.djvu/114

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102
A GUIDE TO HEALTH

diseases, according to the varying constitutions of individuals. In some it produces constipation. The bowels do not move, or move only partly, and there is great straining at stools, until it results in bleeding, or at times in the discharge of mucus, or piles. In others, it leads to diarrhea, which often ends in dysentery. In others again, it may give rise to gripes, accompanied by pain in the stomach and the discharge of mucus.

In all these cases, the patient loses his appetite, his body gets pale and weak, his tongue gets coated, and his breath foul. Many also suffer from headache and other complaints. Constipation, indeed, is so common that hundreds of pills and powders have been invented to cure it. The chief function of such patent medicines as Mother Sriget's Syrup and Eno's Fruit-salt is to relieve constipation, and hence thousands of people go in for them in the vain hope of being cured for good. Any Vaid or Hakim will tell you that constipation and the like are the result of indigestion, and that the best way to cure them is to remove the causes of indigestion; but the more candid among them will confess that they are forced to manufacture pills and powders, since the patients are not really prepared to renounce their bad habits, but at the same time want to get cured. Indeed the present-day advertisements of such