Medicine: Salted Down

Two years ago, Professor Einar Meulen-gracht, chief physician of Bispebjaerg Hospital in Copenhagen, examined a 71-year-old Swedish engineer who had lost four inches and was slowly shrinking back to boyhood height. So brittle had his bones become that once when he bent to pick up a heavy weight he heard his spine crack. To bolster up his telescoped vertebrae doctors had tried three different leather corsets, three fabric corsets with iron stays, as well as heavy doses of Vitamin D, calcium, and ground eggshells. Dr. Meulengracht found that the patient had always had sufficient calcium in his diet, but that apparently little of it had been absorbed for many years. No textbook diagnosis explained his case.

In last week’s Lancet Dr. Meulengracht revealed the answer to this medical mystery. The patient was a “hypochondriac,” he said, “and obsessed by his evacuations.” Every morning for 35 years he had taken one teaspoon of Carlsbad salts as a laxative. Carlsbad salts “are mainly composed of sodium sulfate and sodium bicarbonate, and presumably a certain amount of calcium of the food was transformed in the intestine into insoluble calcium sulfate which was then evacuated.” The result was “a calcium deficiency of the skeletal system.” When the patient was deprived of Carlsbad salts his disease was checked. Although still short and top-heavy he can now move about free and uncorseted.