If you're irvthe habit of taking iron pills or an iron tonic, without your doctor's okay, you'd better stop right now.
If you don't need iron, taking an iron tonic will actually harm you. Yes, even if you're anemic. For, contradictorily enough, if your anemia isn't caused by an iron deficiency, you can make yourself anemic by taking iron* , Too much Vitamin A or Vitamin D can lead to super-vitami-nosis. On the happier side of the ledger is the fact that the new sulfa drugs are now comparatively safe and you can now have your thyroid tested with the aid of geiger counters.
All of this is what speakers told delegates to the American Society of Medical Technologists at convention sessions Tuesday at the Jung hotel. Between sessions, delegates inspected exhibits, which included a blood-counting machine, said to be tops for accuracy; an array of Afican frogs, used to test pregnancy; a geiger counter setup, to help determine blood changes following an operation, and another geiger counter apparatus which was heralded as the new way of determining whether your thyroid is over or under-active.
Dr. R. Dorothy Sundberg, Minneapolis, Minn., warned against
the willy-nilly use of iron capsules or iron tonics.
"If a person has an anemia, not due to an iron deficiency, and takes an iron tonic or capsules, containing iron, they can get too much iron in their system," said Dr. Sundberg, who is associate professor of anatomy at the University of Minnesota and hema-tologist at the University of Minnesota hospital.
"It isn't safe to take iron until you've had your blood tested to see if you need it," she added. "The fact that so many people get away with it, without harm, is probably due to the fact that lots of people are actually deficient in iron. But this doesn't mean everyone is suffering from an iron deficiency. Unless you're suffering from an iron deficiency type of anemia, taking iron will actually give you anemia."
