Part 3: Discouraging Bugs, Treating Boo-Boos

In this last installment of the series examining inexpensive and natural alternatives to the many household products people spend so much money on through the year, I want to look at the basic summertime first aid kit.

My family lives in the “deep woods” that Deep Woods Off^TM was invented to de-bug. We have lots of company during the summer season, adults and children. There’s not much one can do about nasty encounters with aggressive poisonous snakes (copperheads are much more aggressive than timber rattlers, who live in the area but are hardly ever seen) or bone breaks or serious puncture wounds or cuts. Those just have to go to the ER, best thing to do is make that happen as quickly as possible. But there are a host of lesser injuries and situations that can be treated adequately at home, without the fancy, expensive products that contribute so much to a weekly grocery bill.

In the first installment of the series I listed the basic ingredients to purchase – brand name or generic (I get generic, but brands aren’t that much more expensive) borax, baking soda, rubbing alcohol, white vinegar, basic soap flakes (or liquid soap made from your disintegrating bath bars), and added ammonia. In the second installment I gave some recipes for laundry soap, kitchen and bath scouring powders, drain cleaner, surface disinfectants, etc. Now, using the same ingredients (plus a few things from the garden) let’s make the first aid kit and general insect management substances…

Insects In The House, Yard and Garden

Chances are your area has its share of mosquitoes, biting gnats, ticks, chiggers, bees, wasps and yellow jackets during the summer. The best thing to do is avoid them altogether, or at least discourage them from taking up close residence.

Mosquito/Gnat Repellant

For some people simply splashing some rubbing alcohol on exposed skin and allowing it to dry will deter mosquitoes and gnats, who are attracted to white clothing, carbon dioxide exhaled by breathing, and the scent of humans. Anything that disguises or (temporarily) eliminates the scent will help repel.

Avon Skin-So-Soft is a strong-smelling bath oil that works very well to repel biting insects, if you can stand the smell.

Crushing and rubbing mint, lemon balm or basil leaves on the skin is often an effective mosquito repellant.

A few drops of essential oil (eucalyptus, cedar, tea tree, fir, etc.) in rubbing alcohol will extend the useful repellant time of plain rubbing alcohol. Oil of citronella, peppermint lemon balm, cloves, geraniums, fleabane (pyrethrum) or rosemary also work.

garlic oil – available as supplements in gelatin shells you can prick with a pin will work if you can stand the smell, and eating a lot of garlic (or taking good doses of the oil supplements) will give your sweat a garlic odor that discourages biting insects. So does a strong decoction of mint, and the mint smells better. Mix with rubbing alcohol, put it in a spray bottle and use liberally.

Wood smoke dispels biting insects too, I’ve found that keeping the campfire going during gatherings and not sweating the smoke very much tends to keep the main portion of the back yard clear of mosquitoes and gnats.

First Aid for Insect Encounters

Wasps, yellow jackets and bees can produce big, painful welts and can cause serious allergic reactions. Bees will often leave a stinger in the skin – DO NOT squeeze or try to pull it out. Scrape it out with the edge of a fingernail or credit card so more venom isn’t introduced. The best immediate treatment I’ve found is a paste of baking soda and cold water. Apply thickly to the sting site and let it dry, then brush the residue off and apply again. As the soda dries, it will tend to pull the venom from the wound.

A good paste for this purpose is also baking soda and rubbing alcohol, so keep these ingredients close together. The alcohol will not only disinfect the site, it dries faster than water and increases the leaching action of the soda.

For pain, applying lemon juice or vinegar to the sting often helps. Ammonia works too, and can definitely help dispel the itch of mosquito bites. A wet tea bag (black tea) applied to bites will help keep swelling down.

If a guest is unlucky enough to encounter a swarm and sustain more than one or two stings (yellow jackets are bad for swarming, as are hornets and sometimes bees), keep some Benedryl cream and pills handy. If anyone coming to visit has a deadly allergy to bees, you might ought to encourage them to go to the beach instead.

A slice of cucumber applied directly to bites helps to ease itching. A cucumber mush (run peeled cukes through the food processor) with some chunks of aloe is very soothing to apply to chigger bites. Add some salt for rashes. You’ll also want to treat chiggers with alcohol, they’re some of the worst bites when it comes to infection setting in.

First Aid for Poison Ivy/Poison Oak

…and other plant irritations. The cucumber and aloe goop mentioned above is soothing to poison ivy rashes, helps to ease itching. But the best thing to do if someone has been somewhere on the property where they’re just bound to encounter ivy, is to put them into a bathtub with about 4-6 inches of tepid water into which you’ve mixed half a cup of baking soda or a quarter cup of chlorine bleach. Have them wash thoroughly all exposed skin with soap and rinse well.

Alternatives to the above are baths with white vinegar or epsom salt.

A paste of baking soda and vinegar is often better than Calamine for easing the itch. It will foam, but if you mix slowly you’ll eventually get a paste thin enough to spread. When it’s good and dry, rinse off again in tepid, salted bathwater, then apply aloe in rubbing alcohol.

Other Issues

A tepid baking soda bath also soothes heat rashes and diaper rash, sunburn and windburn, and other skin rashes.

Baking soda paste is an excellent whitening toothpaste, and baking soda in water is a healthful mouth rinse. Half a teaspoon of soda in half a glass of water eases heartburn and acid indigestion as well as upset stomach from gas.

A strong, hot water salt solution is a great gargle for sore throats. My father swore by hot salt water, we never kept sore throat medicines in our house – salt water was it, and it worked.

I advise everyone to keep a healthy aloe plant in a big pot somewhere in the house or on the porch to treat sumburns, minor burn-burns, skin scrapes and lesions, dry skin, etc., etc. Mints aren’t hard to grow either, and like Rosemary are perennial wherever you put them. If the mints escape into the yard (as they’re entirely likely to do), just mow them when you mow the grass. Makes your fresh-mowed lawn smell absolutely heavenly, and you’ve plenty of mint for making teas, stomach-soothers, bug repellant, etc.

If readers have more money-saving recipes and hints, please post them in the comments! One could spend literally hundreds of dollars on these sort of products just for the summer season, or save a lot of money by doing it themselves!

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: List of Ingredients
Part 2: Recipes
Part 3: Bugs & First Aid

Part 1: The List of Ingredients

Now that it’s late May, it’s time to stock up for the summer – and our many summer visitors – on things like bug repellant (we really do live in the Deep Woods), anti-itch solution, insect sting remedies, poison ivy treatments, cut and scrape treatments, etc. The basic summertime First Aid Kit, all ingredients of which will be used as regularly as the usual household cleaners, deodorizers, detergents, polishes and disinfectants get used all year round.

Might as well get items that do double or triple duty as household cleansers and disinfectants as well as personal skin and hair care products too. I’ll use this post to make the basic list of things to buy, and later posts will give specific recipes and hints on how to use them to best advantage. And the best thing about these products? They’re Green and Eco-Friendly to boot!

Baking Soda: It all starts with good old baking soda. You can purchase generic or the primary name brand we recognize (Arm and Hammer). It’s cheap either way, and the same product though generic will tend to clump and solidify quicker and easier. Compared against the multitude of specialty chemicalized products you could be buying to do many of the same tasks, you could save hundreds of dollars a year with a cleaner, fresher house and a healthier family to show for it!

Baking soda is a good deodorizer for carpets and upholstery (even effective against pet and human urine odors), disinfectant, anti-fungal, a surface-safe scouring powder, cockroach insecticide, drain unclogger, silver and copper polish, laundry aid and pH equalizer for things like pool water. It is used medicinally as an anti-itch wash, insect sting treatment, toothpaste, mouthwash, gargle for sore throats poison ivy neutralizer, soothing treatment for athlete’s foot, an antacid, deodorant and anti-acne scrub. Given that it doesn’t cost much – particularly in 4-5 pound boxes – it can save you a bundle on all these sort of products that cost several dollars apiece.

Borax: Our list of necessary household basics continues with another sodium product, borax. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, while borax is sodium borate decahydrate. It’s a laundry booster (improves detergent action, natural colorsafe bleach), a water softener, multipurpose cleaner, fungicide, preservative, insecticide, herbicide, disinfectant and dessicant.

Plain Salt: The final sodium product on the list of must-haves is salt. You should always keep a one-pound box of plain (Kosher, iodine-free) salt on hand for non-table uses. This can be fine grain or coarse, basic sodium chloride purified from a mine rather than more expensive sea salt (which comes with quite a few extra minerals and chemicals than even iodized table salt). Salt has many general household and medicinal uses, such as water (and skin) softener in bath water, soothing soak for sore muscles and arthritic joints, anti-microbial mouthwash for gum disease, sore throat gargle, nasal decongestant spray (with soda in water) and eyewash.

Vinegar: Next on the list is your basic gallon jug of white vinegar. Vinegar is also a good disinfectant, a strong degreaser, streak-free glass cleaner, no-wax floor cleaner, stain remover from carpets and upholstery, wood furniture polish and ring remover (with olive oil), garbage disposal and drain deodorizer, brass polish, ant deterrent, stainless steel cleaner, bathroom water and soap deposit scrub, faucet and shower head unclogger and in the yard, an effective weed and grass killer (spray directly).

Olive Oil, Light Safflower Oil: These are of course useful for maintaining leather and wood furniture, and in certain recipes can be substituted for liquid soaps (they also provide fats for homemade soaps). But you’ll want these primarily for skin and hair care products and bath oils and such. Buy basic 12-ounce bottles for these purposes and keep them separate from the oils you use normally for cooking and baking.

Lemon Juice, Rubbing Alcohol, Liquid Soap: Lemon juice and rubbing alcohol are household and medicinal necessities to keep on hand for a number of uses, along with liquid soap. If you save the dregs of your soap bars (those annoying left-overs that end up melted all over your sink or tub holder) in a pump jar with a little water (shake occasionally), you’ll be surprised at how much normally gets thrown away. Or, if you’re really enterprising, you can make your own soaps!

All told, I could go to the store today and bring home ample supplies of all these items for about $20, knowing they’ll last through the crowded summer and some will last through the rest of the year. If you were to do an inventory of all the specialized products you buy – furniture polish, drain opener, toilet bowl cleaner, bathtub and sink scrubs, spray-on spot removers, laundry additives, bath, skin care and beauty products, insect repellants, first aid sprays and creams and gargles and washes, etc., etc., etc., you’d find yourself spending hundreds over the next six months. Sometimes the best products are the old-fashioned (still cheap) ones!

Below are links to some basic uses on the web that readers may find useful. I’ll provide more specific recipes in my next post for household cleaning and disinfecting. Then I’ll list specifics on the first aid and medicinal recipes and uses. Later in this series we’ll look at personal care basics and how you can save a whole lot of money not buying fancy facial masks, skin treatments, moisturizers, wrinkle creams, bath treatments and skin soothers. So please stay tuned to put all this together!

Links:

Vinegar Institute: Uses & Tips
64 Uses for Vinegar
Uncommon Household Uses for Salt
Top 6 Uses for Borax
20 Mule Team Borax: Many Household Uses [pdf document]
FAQs: Arm & Hammer

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: List of Ingredients
Part 2: Recipes
Part 3: Bugs & First Aid

The Situation: Desperate, as usual

Even as the many politicians line up on both sides of the party divide to try and convince the citizenry they’re the man or woman for ‘The Job’ of cleaning out the mess our current national leadership has made out of D.C. over the past 6 1/2 years, research studies, issue forums and public opinion polls are consistently tracking growing concerns about the state of health care in America. From many worsening indications, it looks like the patient is fading fast.

It’s not just the cost of health care, though at this point a significant majority of the solid middle class is just a single serious illness or accident away from bankruptcy. Rapidly increasing numbers of the insured are discovering that despite paying more for insurance every month than for the mortgage, their for-profit provider will not actually pay for health care. Most insurance companies these days pay whole departments full of people whose only job is to deny coverage. Other companies are requiring larger co-pays and deductibles, even while raising the premiums. And governments have capped the safety net systems (Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP) so that they can’t accept the millions who have fallen through the cracks.

The public consistently reports health care as at the top of their concerns, right behind the war in Iraq. They’ve plenty to be concerned about. Those emergency rooms President Bush claims are there to take care of the citizens who have no insurance or money are now turning people away, or releasing them untreated. In my area there is a single hospital conglomerate the government allowed to merge a few years ago, that will not treat any state employees and no longer stitches cuts or sets broken bones in the ER. They’ll clean out your cut, put a band-aid on it, x-ray your broken arm and charge you $500 for the hour, but they won’t stitch or set. For that you have to make an appointment with a specialist. They’ll give you a name and phone number, perhaps get seen this week. Oh… and sometimes you can get pain pills, if that break is deformed enough or swollen enough to elicit the nurse’s sympathy. There are usually no doctors on duty.

Real analyses of the situation put the lie to the constant mantra of “best health care in the world!” from greedy politicians taking money from Big Pharma and the insurance companies. The US now ranks at the bottom of the list of industrialized nations in both life expectancy and infant mortality. The racial and class discrepancies are striking and growing worse as the working poor and middle classes put off medical care, doctor and dentist visits, and regular testing that was once routine. They’re sicker by the time they do get seen, and it’s often too late to help them. Insurance company accountants and pencil-pushers are practicing medicine without licences every day, all over the country. This is called “Murder By Spread Sheet.” []

So I think it will be helpful to talk about what regular people living through hard times (or choosing to live on less) can do about their health and basic health care on their own. This project will take up a series of topics, to include educating yourself and your family about being healthy, how to deal with emergencies they don’t treat at the ER anymore, how to avoid high-priced prescription drugs for common ailments, knowing something useful about alternative health care options, and how to tune your family’s diet toward something that enhances their lives every day while NOT killing them.

Provider Priorities

Until very recently on the historical scale – when a family needs at least 2 incomes just to cover food, clothing and shelter – the #1 health care provider was Mom. Fathers and grandparents have also helped to fill these roles, and very often there was a trained nurse (or otherwise titled medicine person) living somewhere within shouting distance and could be counted upon to analyze just about any situation quickly and efficiently as to how serious things might be.

When I was growing up it was also standard operating procedure for every teenager to take Red Cross first aid and life-saving training, with refreshers every June as soon as school let out. Worse, most of us had spent years in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, and had all our necessary badges. Moreover, everyone in my peer group was expected to volunteer for at least 2 out of the 3 summers of high school at the VA hospital or a nursing home, at least 2 days a week. That experience – part of a traditional social ethic our parents brought with them through the Great Depression and World War II – taught us a lot about sickness, injury, pain, depression, loneliness and hopelessness. Things kids seem to be shielded from quite thoroughly these days, when health care is shrouded in the foreign language of scientific sterility and people are so easily persuaded to believe health care is all about big, mysterious machines, Porche-driving specialists and expensive ‘designer’ drugs.

In that less dangerous (and far less obese) world when kids were outside most every day all day doing things that would likely give their parents heart attacks, we could count on the fact that 9 out of 10 of us at the swimming hole knew how to splint a badly broken bone, deal with a poisonous snakebite, stop serious bleeding, bandage cuts, assuage bruises, assess head injuries, remove fish hooks, halt choking, provide CPR to the drowned, even carry an unconscious friend to help without adding to the injury.

For anyone attempting to live on a shoestring budget at this point in history, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to educate yourself on first aid and CPR, to take control of these aspects of caring for yourself and your family. I’ve linked some of the best sources below, but for little investment there are excellent teachers and very good courses available from your local Scout organizations, WMCA and WYCA, your local Red Cross, etc. If you live in a rural area, the volunteer fire department often has classes going at least twice a year that will cost YOU little or nothing if you’ll volunteer a Saturday watch a month.

And don’t be afraid to take it further. I have seen LPN [Licensed Practical Nurse] training offered at local community colleges for a mere $30 per semester (there will only be 2 before licensing) plus textbook, and you can often buy that used. We go to our tri-county “Textbook Fair” every summer, where textbooks that have been replaced by the State Board go on sale or are given away for free. We’ve an entire library shelf of basic nursing, biology, microbiology, first aid, health and other such books we’ve accumulated. We also keep handy a Merck Manual, which is the best printed resource for anyone who cares to identify conditions and know what the proper treatments are. Have a drug manual as well, which is a fat encyclopedia of prescriptions drugs that tells you everything you might want to know about what your doctor prescribed.

Last but not least, if you’ve got a friend or relative who IS a registered (preferably practicing) nurse, you’re three steps ahead of the average man-on-the-street. My sister is an RN case manager at a large private hospital in Florida. It’s her task to follow the diagnoses, testing and treatments to make sure patients are getting the best possible care for what ails them. That, and fighting with insurance companies over what they’ll pay for. Whenever we’ve got a condition we’d like to handle ourselves, I do the initial research and write it down, then give her a call. Sometimes I feel good about my choices, sometimes she tells me to go straight to a real doctor. I trust her judgment.

Nurses don’t get much respect these days, but they are in fact the primary health care providers in our society. A doctor may spend 10 years in medical school and grad school and internship for his/her specialty, and might be a great brain surgeon. But a nurse knows more about basic nutrition, health maintenance, wound management, immediate intervention, disinfecting a sickroom and assessing a patient’s overall state than the doctor does.

Most folks can learn a good deal of this sort of health care wisdom and practice, and can put it to good use in their home. People – including kids – really don’t have to be rushed to the hospital or taken to the clinic or sandwiched into the doctor’s schedule for most of the usual seasonal illnesses or accidents, or even some of the chronic illnesses that have become so prevalent these days.

I’ll talk about what more families can do for themselves in coming installments in this series. In the meantime, do check out the links below and start downloading – or buying (many books are available used for a fraction of list price) – information you can put on your handy health care shelf right next to the first aid kit and pharmaceutical desk reference.

Links:

KidsHealth: First Aid & Safety

HealthWorld Online: Emergency & First Aid

MayoClinic: First-Aid Guide

The Merck Manual of Medical Information (Home Edition)