Care & Aid Health

Have you ever heard of a situation of a stressed person trying to figure out how to dial 911? Believe me it happens. We had a medical emergency at our home and I had asked my husband to call 911. He was so stressed. I was listening for him to talk, and all I heard was paper rustling. He was looking in the phone book, trying to get the number for 911. Keep a list of emergency numbers by your telephone, preferably one that not only includes your veterinarians name and phone number, but also the name and phone number of an emergency animal hospital, plus your own name, address, and phone number.

Over the next couple of articles I will attempt to give a little insight to some common situations. You will find just as you did with the First Aid Kit, that there are a lot of similarities between animal and human needs. I must stress that the articles are just meant to be helpful just as taking a First Aid class is meant to be helpful. Never self diagnose your pet, consult a veterinarian. Hopefully, these article can help until you can get professional treatment.

The concept of First Aid means: emergency car and treatment of an injured or ill patient until proper medical treatment is obtained. It may be critical to move the patient from further injury, but try not to make the situation worse (“DO NO HARM”). First Aid should never take the place of professional advice and care.

The first tool you will need is common sense. Remember, your pet cannot communicate to you the full nature of the injury or illness. Realize that your pet is probably going to be upset and frightened. Determine whether or not you will have to muzzle your pet. Take stock of the situation, and decide what equipment and help you will need. Relax yourself. Your being upset will only further upset your pet. Take a deep breath and talk calmly and softly to the injured pet. Use basic psychology. It works for pets as well. Treat your pet just as you would like to be treated in the same situation. You will accomplish more than you would expect. This will help your pet, yourself, and your veterinarian. Once you have conversed with a veterinarian and have decided to transport the pet to the hospital if necessary, DRIVE SAFELY! If a muzzle is necessary, one can be created from a belt, a necktie, or gauze. Wrap the gauze around the muzzle, cross the strips under the chin and then bring the gauze around the neck and tie it behind the ears. This will prevent the dog from biting you if it is upset. Small animals can be restrained in a blanket. Blankets can also be used to move an injured animal off the road. They can also be used warm and comfort an animal that is possibly going into shock. So, lets begin:

ALLERGIES -if you suspect allergies because the animal has hives, has swelling of the face or ears, vomiting or diarrhea, respiratory problems you should immediately contact your veterinarian. Some common allergies are spider bites, wasp or bee stings, foods, fleas, cedar, drugs such as penicillin or sulpha drugs. Keep your pet from biting or scratching itself, which may cause further problems such as infection. It’s easier said than done.

ANAPHYLAXIS -this is a severe life threatening allergic reaction. In some cases not only will there be respiratory failure but also internal bleeding. This requires immediate veterinary treatment. Keep the pet warm and relaxed until you get there.

BURNS -It is rare that a dog gets burned accidentally by fire. Most common injuries are from falling into hot water, or having hot water or grease spilled on the animal. Pets can also get burns in the throat or esophagus from trying to eat hot foods that may have been dropped in the kitchen. All of these situations require veterinary care. Keep the pet relaxed in a clean spot until you get to the veterinarian.

BITE WOUNDS -assess the severity of the wound. Wash with lots of clean fresh water. Bandage and apply a pressure bandage if the pet is bleeding severely. Determine if the biter has rabies. Contact the veterinarian who will determine how quickly the injured pet needs to be seen.

This will be continued next week. If Jiminy Cricket were a cricket for pets instead of Pinocchio, he wouldn’t be singing “Let your conscience be your guide” he would be singing “Let your veterinarian be your guide”.

By: Terrie Simpson

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These are two very different modus operandi in approaching the goal of physical wellness and it is worth taking a look at the differences between the two.

I would argue that each has a valid role and we only get into trouble with them when one or the other tries to perform a role to which it is not suited.

For example, if you are in an automobile accident and your leg is partially severed and your artery is pumping blood, taking vitamins or drinking green tea are quite frankly not going to help very much. If that ever happens to me my first stop I can tell you is going to be neither a nutritionist nor a chiropractor but the nearest casualty department where (I hope) I will be pumped full of anesthetics and stitched back together again pronto. Having survived the immediate life-threatening situation thanks to the good offices of conventional medicine, which excels at that sort of thing, I will then set about a nutritional handling so as to optimize the efficiency with which the body achieves its long-term repair and recovery – and alternative medicine excels at THAT sort of thing.

So let’s have a quick layman’s look at the two modus operandi so one can decide which is the most appropriate for whatever it is one seeks to handle.

Conventional medicine excels in emergency/casualty type care and in dealing with life-threatening situations. To those scenarios it brings a fantastic amount of expertise and wisdom: just watching, for example, some paramedic team bring back to life a drowned child whose heart had stopped beating borders on the witnessing of miracles.

There are times when a quick fix is necessary. If your arteries are so clogged with cholesterol, for example, that if you move too suddenly you could drop dead, then it’s time to take the statins and get the cholesterol out of one’s tubing a.s.a.p. Eating a bowl of salad or a tin of sardines just ain’t gonna cut it. It is a life-threatening situation, so you do whatever you can to fix the guy up and keep him breathing.

Then, when the immediate emergency is over, you can look to your long term handling: a Mediterranean diet and so forth to sort out both the cholesterol problem and the damage done elsewhere in the body by the statins.

Where a necessary quick-fix is concerned there is often a trade-off in which death is averted but at the cost of some damage done to the body by the intervention. Most of us would consider this a fair trade.

The Conventional approach to the treatment of most illnesses, mild or serious, is routinely to hit the condition with drugs or surgery. Here again is a quick-fix even though immanent death is not being averted and drugs in particular that are designed to attack one set of symptoms invariably cause problems and malfunctions in other areas of the body.

Conventional medicine’s approach is to treat symptoms, not the underlying causes. For example, if one’s cholesterol is too high, your doctor will routinely prescribe statin drugs to remove it from the arteries. Very little is done to investigate and discover and understand the reason WHY, for that individual, cholesterol is rising. For example, the reason might be excessive homocysteine levels prompting the body to coat the arteries with a protective layer of cholesterol and homoscysteine – the actual CAUSE of the high cholesterol in this example – could be controlled with B vitamins with no price to pay in terms of side effects. In fact, an overall improvement in health is often achieved because adequate levels of B vitamins will have a whole spectrum of benefits.

Drugs are chemicals that are not part of the body’s evolution and operate on the body essentially as foreign matter. Using again the example of statins to treat cholesterol, these drugs work by blocking the production of cholesterol in the liver. This handles the symptom of excessive cholesterol production but at the price of also blocking the production of a vital enzyme – CoQ10 – that is key to energy production in the muscles.

Their financial value to the manufacturers lies in the very fact that drugs are not naturally occurring substances but invented: being invented they can be patented. The owner of the patent can then market the drug at a high price. Substances such as vitamins on the other hand, occurring in nature, cannot be patented and thus anyone can produce and market them, and that means their pricing must be competitive.

Conventional medicine treats the human body in parts, not as a whole: the departments in medical schools and hospitals tend to be organ-specific and produce doctors highly specialized in one organ or bodily function. This compartmentalization does not reflect how the body and its components function because the body is a highly integrated system of complex interrelations.

The training of conventional medical doctors is based upon “rescue medicine,” thinking. It is perhaps an understandable over-emphasis considering how well conventional medicine has won at that particular game. However, we run into trouble when the quick-fix/rescue type of intervention is extended into long-term treatments. For example, a tranquillizer taken to calm down a person so violently and dangerously agitated they are likely to kill someone in their vicinity, if not themselves, can alleviate the immediate crisis without the side-effects doing too much damage if treatment is of short duration.

But the agitation is a SYMPTOM of some underlying problem. If the tranquilizer is used as a long-term suppressor of symptoms in place of finding and treating the underlying causes, then the damage it does to the body’s delicately interrelated systems will start to become evident. That damage can be serious and can become life threatening in itself.

Meanwhile, the cause of the problem remains in place and unaddressed and prevention of disease receives far less than the emphasis it by rights should receive. Alternative medicine on the other hand approaches medical treatment by placing its focus primarily on finding the CAUSE of a condition or symptom and treating that on the one hand and overall wellness that PREVENTS disease on the other.

In that its treatment of a malady targets restoring optimum function to the interrelated system as a whole, alternative medicine can rarely achieve the quick fix but it also rarely causes the complications engendered by the quick-fix approach.

On the contrary, the overall wellness approach tends to produce a spectrum of benefits broader than the resolution of the particular malfunction that first red-flagged the need for a handling. Again, the use of the Mediterranean diet is an example: its benefits extend beyond the reduction of cholesterol in the arteries to overall liver, kidney and heart health, weight loss, restored energy levels and so on.

Conventional medicine, particularly its drugs with their tendency to set in train further complications requiring treatment, tend to be costly both to the individual pocket and government. The health services of many nations are creaking under the financial burden occasioned by declining health and escalating drugs costs. Alternative medicine on the other hand, by reason of its whole approach, tends to be a far less costly option.

Our societies are at this moment undergoing something of a seismic shift at grass roots levels in their approach to healing as the number of people turning to alternative therapies grows year by year. Nutrition as a science has advanced by leaps and bounds, practices such as chiropractics and kinesiology are increasingly recognized as bona fide therapies and confidence in conventional medicine is in decline, while the drugs manufacturers must work ever harder and more ruthlessly to maintain their market share. Even giant food manufacturing corporations, not hitherto particularly noted for their concern for our physical well being, have jumped on the bandwagon with sometimes hilariously overblown claims for the nutritional content of their products.

This grass roots change has not been reflected yet in the orientation of most general practitioners. So many of them are still slow to direct their patients to alternative therapies and optimum nutrition. They still reach for the prescription pad and send the patient quickly on his way with some drug to nullify a symptom.

Alternative medicine is also notably more accessible to the layman, who can relatively easily learn many of its tenets and therapies for himself or become quite adept on the subject of nutrition. Thus in large measure the layman can gain control over his own destiny so far as his health is concerned. Many a layman, becoming interested in the subject of nutrition, vitamins, minerals, enzymes and so on, is soon dismayed by the realization that he apparently knows more about the subject than his GP!

Why is this culture-lag on the part of doctors happening?

The answer may lie at least in part in the fact that the driving force behind conventional medicine has for a long time been the pharmaceutical industry.

Most medical schools receive considerable funding from an industry that has a vested interest in marketing its medicines. Through this financial influence over the medical schools, plus relentless marketing of their products to doctors in general practice, the pharmaceutical industry has achieved overwhelming influence over conventional medicine ( what is called in the trade, “full spectrum dominance”), creating an ethos that is embraced by both modern doctors and pharmacists, many of whom think of their worth in terms knowing which drug to prescribe for a particular set of symptoms.

There are other factors at play too:

Funding of medical research favours conventional medicine over alternative medicine by a huge margin. For example just 0.08 percent (!) of the British National Health Service research budget is allocated to alternative research and out of $12 billion allocated every year by Congress to the National Institute of Health, a mere $5.4 million (an even smaller 0.054% percent by my reckoning) goes to the Office of Alternative Medicine to investigate the claims of approximately 50 therapies.

This neglect by government of alternative medicine research in favor of conventional drug-based medicine naturally constricts the speed at which the safe and cost effective alternatives can advance in research and the accumulation of expertise. How might nutrition and its allied sciences have flourished had it had the psycho-pharmacy’s funding? As such it is a grave disservice to the citizenry who have every right to expect that government will protect and serve so far as their health is concerned.

Despite this, the field of nutrition for one has still managed to make considerable advances and evolve a level of understanding in many respects in advance of that of conventional medicine.

By: Kieron Mcfadden

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Hearing aids are expensive and contain some very sensitive circuitry that should be taken great care of. Cleaning your hearing aid on a regular basis helps to ensure that it lasts as long as it possibly can. A dirty hearing aid can also cause ear infections, which is another good reason to clean it properly!

The process of cleaning a hearing aid varies from type to type because different types of hearing aids have different structures and different degrees of delicacy. You should consider certain precautions before attempting to clean your hearing aid. Make sure your hands are washed and dried, remember not to get the electronic parts wet, so be careful! It is advised that you use a soft, cotton cloth to clean the entire device, you can use cleaners, but try not to go overboard.

- Cleaning Behind-The-Ear Hearing Aids: BTE aids are sufficiently big enough to hold in your hand while you’re cleaning them. They consist of an ear mold (the casing that fits behind the ear) and tubing. Dirt can accumulate behind the ear especially if you’re wearing something over there. When you take off the hearing aid at night, make sure to wipe it off with a dry cloth and examine it carefully to find any dried spots or earwax. BTE hearing aids can be washed occasionally using soap and water, however make sure not to soak them for too long. Also make sure you dry them completely before putting them back on.

- Cleaning In-The-Ear Hearing Aids: The procedure for cleaning ITE aids is almost the same as the procedure for cleaning other hearing aids. They are more sensitive and smaller than other aids, so you need to take extra care while cleaning them. Like BTE aids, you should inspect them daily after taking off at night to look for any dried earwax on them, especially on the area that goes directly into the canal. After looking for wax use a soft cloth to clean it. If there is earwax found on any of the parts, sometimes it can be quite stubborn, in this case you can use some hard material.

Many manufacturers provide necessary cleaning tools along with the device and instructions on how to clean them.

Cleaning Products

It’s not very difficult to clean most hearing aids as long as you remember to take the necessary precautions. Hearing aids can also be taken care of by cleaning your ears and preventing any earwax accumulating in the first place. There are many ear cleaning products available out there, don’t use dry cotton buds, try some wipes.

Other cleaning products are dri-aid, sanitized spray and ear cream. Dri-aid is a tool to keep your ears dry and so in theory they shouldn’t have as much wax. Spray tools work like cleaning wipes in a way that ensures germ control for longer periods of time, these spray products are very effective and easy-to-use.

In addition to individual products, you can also purchase cleaning kits that are quite inexpensive when compared to the individual costs of all the tools combined. These kits also contain all the necessary tools that you will require.

Ear candling is a technique of ear cleaning in which a candle is made by folding a piece of paper like a tube. One end is ignited and the other is put into the ear to naturally remove wax and other dirt. Although the process is simple and totally natural, it’s not always very effective. Furthermore, you need to take extra care and know exactly when to extinguish the flame, otherwise it can prove to be painful, for both the patient and the lighter of the candle! Therefore, it’s highly recommended that you buy some form of sanitized spray along with some other tools to clean your ears on a regular basis.

By: Mandy Fain

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