The Panty-Girdle Problem

Doctors rarely see what kind of girdles their patients wear, which explains why it took so long to find out what was wrong with two Manhattan women who went to St. Vincent's Hospital complaining that their feet and legs swelled every afternoon.

The first woman, report Dr. Charles A. Ribaudo and Dr. Anthony A. Formato in the New York State Journal of Medicine, was a secretary, only 20, who seemed to be in the best of health except for that one complaint. And on vacation, when she was active on the beach all day, the swelling never appeared. Eventually a doctor noted a line around each thigh--about where he figured a round garter would have been in the Gay Nineties. His suspicions aroused, the doctor asked about her girdle. It proved to be the "panty type--that is, each thigh was completely encircled with elastic material." The same was true of another woman, aged 52, in whose case diagnosis was more difficult because she actually had some blood-clotting problems.

If worn tightly, the doctors say, panty girdles of this style may act like tourniquets, checking the return flow of blood and lymph from the feet and legs to the trunk. An all-around girdle is not so likely to have this effect, even if tight, because blood and lymph find alternate return channels on the inner side of the thighs. Once the "dependent edema" caused by tight panty girdles has been diagnosed, the prescription for cure is simple and straightforward: throw away the girdle.

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