Bed rest was very important for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis before chemotherapy era.
Now it is apt to be considered negligible by many authors when chemotherapy is applied strong enough. But is this true? This was the problem of this symposium.
There was no author among the reporters of this symposium who insisted that bed rest was wholly unnecessary.
According to Dr. Uemura, the results of the initial chemotherapy of the far advanced cases were far superior with regard to X-ray improvement and cavity closure, when the patients were kept upder the strict bed rest, though there was no difference in sputum conversion. However, in Japan, as it is very difficult to make patients obey the doctor's order at present, Dr. Takagi decided to compare the difference between the patients who strictly adhered to this activity ordered by the doctor and the others who didn't. The former was bettert han the latter in some cases with fresh and extepsive infiltration.
Dr. Miyoshi and Dr. Mikami compared the results merely between inpatients and outpatients. Dr. Miyoshi concluded that there were no difference between them, using the matched pair method on the initial chemotherapy. Dr. Mikami's result was superior in the hospitalized cases.
For the long standing chronic severe cases, Dr. Matsushita and Dr. Miyagi believes that if they are not too ill, it maybe better to give them some movement than to keep them too strictly to bed rest.
Experimental work of Matsushita showed that the condition of tuberculous mice forced to swim excessively were worse than the mice without swimming, but if with strong chemotherapy the difference became less.
Dr. Yamamoto recomended the bed rest at the begining of chemotherapy, because he found the X-ray findings were very variable at that time.
Moreover the meaning of bed rest is very difficult to decide. For some patients, it may be enough to keep only 2 hours bed rest except sleeping time, but for the others, 24 hours may be necessary. Perhaps it may depend on many factors, that is, seriousness of the sickness, active or not, fresh or old, nature of the cavity, especially effectiveness of the chemotherapy including the drug resistance.
We must examine more precisely these factors to evaluate the importance of bed rest.
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