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To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
Different Drugs
for Migraine Treatment, Prevention
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
As an adolescent and young adult, I was plagued
with migraine headaches. Finally, one of my
doctors prescribed Inderal, which I took twice a
day for about one and a half years. It totally
controlled my headaches. Eventually I tapered off
of it. I was migraine-free for several years. I
restarted it when the headaches returned, and it
again controlled them. The cure seemed like a
miracle to me. I’ve often wondered why
it’s not a commonly prescribed medicine for
migraines. Would you comment? -- M.R.
ANSWER: For those
not familiar with migraine headaches, be
thankful. They’re some of the worst
headaches imaginable. In about 60 percent of
people, the headache is on one side of the head.
The remainder feel it on both sides. It’s a
throbbing headache. The pulsations are in time
with the heartbeat. Nausea frequently accompanies
the headache and might precipitate vomiting.
Activity, bright light and loud sounds aggravate
the pain, so a migraine sufferer seeks out a
quiet, dark room to lie down until the headache
subsides. That can take from four hours to three
days.
Triptan drugs have
revolutionized migraine treatment. Brand names
include Imitrex, Zomig, Maxalt, Amerge and Frova.
Ergotamine, a medicine that’s been around
for years, still comes to the rescue for many.
You don’t see
Inderal on the list for migraine treatment. It
doesn’t work for that. However, it is on the
list for migraine prevention. Here it does work.
I’m happy to hear that it has been a success
for you. It is for many. Inderal is a beta
blocker drug. Other beta blockers are also
prescribed for migraine prevention. If none of
them achieves that goal, there are other
medicines that can.
LETTERS from
a SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his SON.
by George Horace
Lorimer
First
published October, 1902
Being the Letters
written by John Graham, Head of the House of
Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago,
familiarly known on ‘Change as "Old
Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont,
facetiously known to his intimates as
"Piggy."
No.16
FROM John Graham, at the
London House of Graham &Co., to his son,
Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.
Mr. Pierrepont has written his father that he is
getting along famously in his new place.
XVII
LONDON, October
24, 189-
Dear Pierrepont:
Well, I’m headed for home at last, checked
high and as full of prance as a spotted circus
horse. Those Dutchmen ain’t so bad as their
language, after all, for they’ve fixed up my
rheumatism so that I can bear down on my right
leg without thinking that it’s going to
break off.
I’m glad to
learn from your letter that you’re getting
along so well in your new place, and I hope that
when I get home your boss will back up all the
good things which you say about yourself. For the
future, however, you needn’t bother to keep
me posted along this line. It’s the one
subject on which most men are perfectly frank,
and it’s about the only one on which it
isn’t necessary to be. There’s never
any use trying to hide the fact that you’re
a jim-dandy--you’re bound to be found out.
Of course, you want to have your eyes open all
the time for a good man, but follow the old
maid’s example--look under the bed and in
the closet, not in the mirror, for him. A man who
does big things is too busy to talk about them.
When the jaws really need exercise, chew gum.
Some men go
through life on the Sarsaparilla Theory--that
they’ve got to give a hundred doses of talk
about themselves for every dollar which they take
in; and that’s a pretty good theory when
you’re getting a dollar for ten cents’
worth of ingredients. But a man who’s giving
a dollar’s worth of himself for ninety-nine
cents doesn’t need to throw in any
explanations.
Of course,
you’re going to meet fellows right along who
pass as good men for a while, because they say
they’re good men; just as a lot of fives are
in circulation which are accepted at their face
value until they work up to the receiving teller.
And you’re going to see these men taking
buzzards and coining eagles from them that will
fool people so long as they can keep them in the
air; but sooner or later they’re bound to
swoop back to their dead horse, and you’ll
get the buzzard smell.
Hot air can take
up a balloon a long ways, but it can’t keep
it there. And when a fellow’s turning
flip-flops up among the clouds, he’s
naturally going to have the farmers gaping at
him. But in the end there always comes a time
when the parachute fails to work. I don’t
know anything that’s quite so dead as a man
who’s fallen three or four thousand feet off
the edge of a cloud.
The only way to
gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a
mountain. You don’t get up so quick, but you
don’t come down so sudden. Even then,
there’s a chance that a fellow may slip and
fall over a precipice, but not unless he’s
foolish enough to try short-cuts over slippery
places; though some men can manage to fall down
the hall stairs and break their necks. The path
isn’t the shortest way to the top, but
it’s usually the safest way.
Life isn’t a
spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can’t
run far up-hill without stopping to sit down.
Some men do a day’s work and then spend six
lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing
with a whoop and use up all their wind in that.
And when they’re rested and have got it
back, they whoop again and start off in a new
direction. They mistake intention for
determination, and after they have told you what
they propose to do and get right up to doing it,
they simply peter out.
I’ve heard a
good deal in my time about the foolishness of
hens, but when it comes to right-down, plum
foolishness, give me a rooster, every time.
He’s always strutting and stretching and
crowing and bragging about things with which he
had nothing to do. When the sun rises, you’d
think that he was making all the light, instead
of all the noise; when the farmer’s wife
throws the scraps in the henyard, he crows as if
he was the provider for the whole farmyard and
was asking a blessing on the food; when he meets
another rooster, he crows; and when the other
rooster licks him, he crows; and so he keeps it
up straight through the day. He even wakes up
during the night and crows a little on general
principles. But when you hear from a hen,
she’s laid an egg, and she don’t make a
great deal of noise about it, either.
I speak of these
things in a general way, because I want you to
keep in mind all the time that steady, quiet,
persistent, plain work can’t be imitated or
replaced by anything just as good, and because
your request for a job for Courtland Warrington
naturally brings them up. You write that Court
says that a man who has occupied his position in
the world naturally can’t cheapen himself by
stepping down into any little piddling job where
he’d have to do undignified things.
I want to start
right out by saying that I know Court and his
whole breed like a glue factory, and that we
can’t use him in our business. He’s one
of those fellows who start in at the top and
naturally work down to the bottom, because that
is where they belong. His father gave him an
interest in the concern when he left college, and
since the old man failed three years ago and took
a salary himself, Court’s been sponging on
him and waiting for a nice, dignified job to come
along and steal him. But we are not in the
kidnapping business.
The only
undignified job I know of is loafing, and nothing
can cheapen a man who sponges instead of hunting
any sort of work, because he’s as cheap
already as they can be made. I never could quite
understand these fellows who keep down every
decent instinct in order to keep up appearance,
and who will stoop to any sort of real meanness
to boost up their false pride.
They always remind
me of little Fatty Wilkins, who came to live in
our town back in Missouri when I was a boy. His
mother thought a heap of Fatty, and Fatty thought
a heap of himself, or his stomach, which was the
same thing. Looked like he’d been taken from
a joke book. Used to be a great eater. Stuffed
himself till his hide was stretched as tight as a
sausage skin, and then howled for painkiller.
Spent all his pennies for cakes, because candy
wasn’t filling enough. Hogged ‘em in
the shop, for fear he would have to give some one
a bite if he ate them on the street.
The other boys
didn’t take to Fatty, and they didn’t
make any special secret of it when he was around.
He was a mighty brave boy and a mighty strong boy
and a mighty proud boy--with his mouth; but he
always managed to slip out of anything that
looked like a fight by having a sore hand or a
case of the mumps. The truth of the matter was
that he was afraid of everything except food, and
that was the thing which was hurting him most.
It’s mighty seldom that a fellow’s
afraid of what he ought to be afraid of in this
world.
Of course, like
most cowards, while Fatty always had an excuse
for not doing something that might hurt his skin,
he would take a dare to do anything that would
hurt his self-respect, for fear the boys would
laugh at him, or say that he was afraid, if he
refused. So one day during recess Jim Hicks dared
him to eat a piece of dirt. Fatty hesitated a
little, because, while he was pretty promiscuous
about what he put into his stomach, he had never
included dirt in his bill-of-fare. But when the
boys began to say that he was afraid, Fatty up
and swallowed it.
And when he dared
the other boys to do the same thing and none of
them would take the dare, it made him mighty
proud and puffed up. Got to charging the bigger
boys and the lounger around the post-office a
cent to see him eat a piece of dirt the size of a
hickory-nut. Found there was good money in that,
and added grasshoppers, at two cents apiece, as a
side line. Found them so popular that he took on
chinch bugs at a nickel, and fairly coined money.
The last I heard of Fatty he was in a Dime
Museum, drawing two salaries--one as "The
Fat Man," and the other as "Launcelot,
The Locust Eater, the Only Man Alive with a
Gizzard."
You are going to
meet a heap of Fatties, first and last, fellows
who’ll eat a little dirt "for fun"
or to show off, and who’ll eat a little more
because they find that there’s some easy
money or times in it. It’s hard to get at
these men, because when they’ve lost
everything they had to be proud of, they still
keep their pride. You can always bet that when a
fellow’s pride makes him touchy, it’s
because there are some mighty raw spots on it.
It’s been my
experience that pride is usually a spur to the
strong and a drag on the weak. It drives the
strong man along and holds the weak one back. It
makes the fellow with the stiff upper lip and the
square jaw smile at a laugh and laugh at a sneer;
it keeps his conscience straight and his back
humped over his work; it makes him appreciate the
little things and fight for the big ones. But it
makes the fellow with the retreating forehead do
the thing that looks right, instead of the thing
that is right; it makes him fear a laugh and
shrivel up at a sneer; it makes him live to-day
on to-morrow’s salary; it makes him a cheap
imitation of some Willie who has a little more
money than he has, without giving him zip enough
to go out and force luck for himself.
I never see one of
these fellows swelling around with their petty
larceny pride that I don’t think of a little
experience of mine when I was a boy. An old
fellow caught me lifting a watermelon in his
patch, one afternoon, and instead of cuffing me
and letting me go, as I had expected if I got
caught, he led me home by the ear to my ma, and
told her what I had been up to.
Your grandma had
been raised on the old-fashioned plan, and she
had never heard of these new-fangled theories of
reasoning gently with a child till its under lip
begins to stick out and its eyes to fill with
tears as it sees the error of its ways. She
fetched the tears all right, but she did it with
a trunk strap or a slipper. And your grandma was
a pretty substantial woman. Nothing of the
tootsey-wootsey about her foot, and nothing of
the airy-fairy trifle about her slipper. When she
was through I knew that I’d been
licked--polished right off to a point--and then
she sent me to my room and told me not to poke my
nose out of it till I could recite the Ten
Commandments and the Sunday-school lesson by
heart.
There was a whole
chapter of it, and an Old Testament chapter at
that, but I laid right into it because I knew ma,
and supper was only two hours off. I can repeat
that chapter still, forward and backward, without
missing a word or stopping to catch my breath.
Every now and then
old Doc Hoover used to come into the
Sunday-school room and scare the scholars into
fits by going around from class to class and
asking questions. That next Sunday, for the first
time, I was glad to see him happen in, and I
didn’t try to escape attention when he
worked around to our class. For ten minutes
I’d been busting for him to ask me to recite
a verse of the lesson, and, when he did, I simply
cut loose and recited the whole chapter and threw
in the Ten Commandments for good measure. It sort
of dazed the Doc, because he had come to me for
information about the Old Testament before, and
we’d never got much beyond, And Ahab begat
Jahab, or words to that effect. But when he got
over the shock he made me stand right up before
the whole school and do it again. Patted me on
the head and said I was "an honor to my
parents and an example to my playmates."
I had been looking
down all the time, feeling mighty proud and
scared, but at that I couldn’t help glancing
up to see the other boys admire me. But the first
person my eye lit on was your grandma, standing
in the back of the room, where she had stopped
for a moment on her way up to church, and glaring
at me in a mighty unpleasant way.
"Tell
‘em, John," she said right out loud,
before everybody.
There was no way
to run, for the Elder had hold of my hand, and
there was no place to hide, though I reckon I
could have crawled into a rat hole. So, to gain
time, I blurted out:
"Tell
‘em what, mam?"
"Tell
‘em how you come to have your lesson so
nice."
I learned to hate
notoriety right then and there, but I knew there
was no switching her off on to the weather when
she wanted to talk religion. So I shut my eyes
and let it come, though it caught on my palate
once or twice on the way out.
"Hooked a
watermelon, mam."
There wasn’t
any need for further particulars with that crowd,
and they simply howled. Ma led me up to our pew,
allowing that she’d tend to me Monday for
disgracing her in public that way--and she did.
That was a
twelve-grain dose, without any sugar coat, but it
sweat more cant and false pride out of my system
than I could get back into it for the next twenty
years. I learned right there how to be humble,
which is a heap more important than knowing how
to be proud. There are mighty few men that need
any lessons in that.
Your affectionate
father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
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