Industrial medical service by private practitioners.

Abstract

Industrial organizations are making increasingly heavy demands on the medical profession for sound guidance on matters of employee health. What is needed, it would seem, is more emphasis on the preventive aspect of medicine and less on the curative aspect. While injuries and some occupational disorders such as contact dermatitis continue to occur with some frequency, it has become unusual for even a large industrial plant to have many. Safety engineering practice has been developed to the point where many employees are actually safer on the job than at home or on the highway. The majority of industrial injuries that do occur are minor and respond quite well to the type of treatment that competent industrial nurses are trained to administer under medical supervision. In few plants does the practice of traumatic surgery require a large part of the time of medical personnel. A growing portion of medical time in