Odd Medicines and Treatments

Odd Medicines and Treatments:

By: Caleb Bentley

15 August 2011

Disclaimer: This report is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treat any diseases.  It is simply for informational and educational purposes, and to help further knowledge in the subject area.  Please, do NOT try any of the following without medical supervision or without consulting a licensed medical doctor in the specific area of interest.  Be smart, and enjoy…

Sugar as an antiseptic: Research is underway in the UK to determine if sugar, yes sugar, can be used in wound treatments, such as bed sores or ulcers.  It appears that sugar helps in killing bacteria and can help the cut heal faster.  “It works because bacteria needs water to grow, so applying sugar to a wound draws the water away and starves the bacteria of water. This prevents the bacteria from multiplying and they die.”

Honey was used in the same way during the early 1900’s, before antibiotics were forms.  I would avoid using honey on a cut as it contains Clostridium botulinum, which can cause a serious infection.

Maggot therapy: when conventional medical treatments don’t work, sometimes doctors will go back to older remedies.  Maggot therapy or maggot debridement therapy (MDT) is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: when there is a wound that does not seems to heal with traditional medicines, medical maggots (yes, medical.  As in you need a doctor’s prescription) are applied to the affected area.  They are used to debride (remove) necrotic (dead) tissue from a severe infection.  This will allow healthy(er) tissue to grow and heal the wound.  Since maggots can apparently discriminate between healthy tissue and necrosed tissue, they know exactly where to consume. 

MDT is not a onetime treatment; the maggots are usually applied once or twice a week, being kept on the wound for 24-48 hours, for 4 to 10 weeks.  This treatment is generally applied as a last ditch effort to try and prevent the amputation of a limb.  MDT is becoming more common in the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers that are unresponsive to traditional antibiotics and medicine.

I must remind you to talk to trained medical professionals before attempting to try this: 

Cayenne pepper to stop a heart attack:  There have been reports of people pouring some cayenne pepper diluted in water into the mouth of a person who was having a heart attack and were able to save their lives without hospital or EMS treatment.  There is VERY little factual research to back up this remedy.  After all, it is kind of hard to plan a heart attack, and ethics committee’s kind of frown on scientists inducing heart attacks on subjects in a laboratory.

Wait! Isn’t CPR supposed to stop a heart attack?  No, CPR is kind of like filing for an extension on your taxes or asking your professor for one more day on a paper: the best case scenario is you get a little extra time and it pays off; the worst case scenario is it doesn’t .  CPR is suppose to keep the person who is going into cardiac arrest (A.K.A., having the heart attack) alive long enough for you or someone to get and AED (Automated External Defibrillators) or for the paramedics to get there with their own AED and take over.  CPR alone, in the event of cardiac arrest, will NOT resuscitate a victim.  It keeps oxygen and blood going to the brain and other vital organs, and give the victim a chance until an AED is available. 

In the event that you do find someone having a heart attack, here are the steps to follow:

1)      Check and make sure the person is in need of help,

2)      Call or instruct someone to call 911 immediately (know your location so the EMS can find you),

3)      Send someone or multiple people to find an AED which is the only proven way to save someone having a heart attack,

4)      And, if you are properly certified, begin CPR using the methods you were taught.  Currently, you give two breaths and compressions and a rate of 100 compressions per minute.

Sorry.  I have to cover my ass, you know how it is.

However, should you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, say on a 2 month backpacking trip through an uncharted rain forest, and the chances of this person getting medical attention within the next 3 days are next to zero, then using cayenne might not be such a bad idea.  Let me know how it goes for you.

Sugar as an antiseptic:

<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/158432.php>

<http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/us/health-healing-treatment-4000-years-old-is-revived.html?src=pm>

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071017102057.htm>

Maggot Therapy:

Here’s some supplemental reading if you are interested in further knowledge in this subject area.

< http://www.hkmj.org/article_pdfs/hkm0710p382.pdf>

< http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/26/2/446.full>

< http://www.usnews.com/science/blogs/thinking-harder/2009/03/31/maggot-therapy-how-to-find-a-doctor-who-will-prescribe-maggots>

< http://www.medicaledu.com/maggots.htm>

Buy medical maggots here à < http://www.monarchlabs.com/>

WARNING; MEDICAL MAGGOT VIDEO’S:

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAY7OKp6D7w>

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8uYE6TJ5X8&feature=related>

Cayenne Pepper: I am only posting CPR articles as there is no scientific or factual reports on the effectiveness of this technique at this time.  Again, just taking cover.

< http://www.medicinenet.com/sudden_cardiac_death/article.htm>

< http://www.cprworks.com/CPR%20INFO%20PAGE.html>

< http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sudden-cardiac-arrest/DS00764>