|
Treatments
Prior the introduction of effective anti-tubercular drug treatment for tuberculous-osteomyelitis was limited to the general treatments employed by the sanatorium such as immobilisation and rest. Soft tissue abscesses, usually the result of underlying bone involvement as with osteomyelitis, were often treated with antibiotic penicillin, which often reduced the amount of discharge from the sinus and gave some inflammatory relief but only on a temporary basis and this failed to address the underlying cause. The various patient medical notes on the treatment of soft tissue infections also reveal references to the drainage and incision of abscesses and also the 'scraping' of infected areas; some of these were performed more than once on an infected area depending on the persistence of the sinus.
These routine techniques accompanied surgical procedures designed for more advanced cases of abscess and sinus formation including curettage and skin grafts.
Curettage simply refers to the removal of infected tissue using a surgical tool called a curette. A Thiersch skin graft is a split-thickness graft that can be quite thin and involves the removal of the epidermis and part of the dermis from a donor site elsewhere on the patient's body, which can then be placed in narrow strips over the wound. Depending on how advanced the tuberculous infection was, many patients healed well after such a procedure whereas others found it to be of little benefit.
|
