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This page is still under construction, and may be incomplete.
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Families used to have favorite home remedies for most common ailments, some of them less useful than others, but also some that are now recognized as having valid medical benefits. Unfortunately, many of them have long been forgotten, discarded in favor of heavily-promoted commercial preparations from the local pharmacy or supermarket. When those items are no longer available, or you run out of the things you were smart enough to stash away, you'll need to know how to get along without them.
There isn't room on this site for all the herbs and other natural remedies, so I'll concentrate on some of the most important ones. There are links throughout the page, and at the bottom, to additional resources. The kind of health needs you're likely to encounter depend on a lot of factors. A disease pandemic, for example, might require medications, whereas a weather incident, such as a tornado, would be more likely to involve trauma. It isn't possible to prepare for every single situation you could foresee. So it's important to know general principles that can be applied to all kinds of situations. The following sections deal more or less individually with disease, trauma, childbirth, death and your personal pharmacy. There is a lot of overlap. Much of the information is at external sites, just to keep the size of this one manageable. What I've done is to print out everything that I find useful and file it in notebooks by subject. Most of the files are also on a flash drive that stays in our bug-out bag. I believe in redundancy.
Disease might be anything from the common cold to global pandemic. This is being updated as swine flu has just been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Fortunately, at this point, most of the cases are relatively mild (though the people who were laid low for weeks with gastro-intestinal problems, high fever and severe muscle pain might argue about calling it "mild"). Mild or not, there have already been many deaths, probably many more than have been reported officially. So this section will concentrate on infectious disease. Many of the containment and treatment protocols are similar, whether one is dealing with an outbreak of measles, flu or bubonic plague. Avoiding the disease If you can keep your family at a safe distance from the infection, it might be possible to avoid it altogether. Unfortunately, that usually isn't going to happen. In many cases, people are exposed before they even know there is a problem, through their school or workplace. But if you have sufficient warning, and you know what the disease vector is (airborne droplets from someone sneezing, a gaseous cloud, surface contamination, insect bites, etc.), you may possibly be able to avoid it altogether. Let's look at these in order of severity. A gaseous cloud suggests wartime or terrorist sources, and those are the least amenable to jury-rigged solutions. Some people have gone to the point of having a positive-pressure room or area in their homes, so airborne particles can't easily enter. If you're interested in that degree of preparedness, check out the Alpha Rubicon page on safe rooms. Airborne droplets are the next most difficult scenario to deal with, but if you know that you have not yet been exposed, and you can keep everyone else out of your home, you may avoid exposure. If a family member has been exposed, especially if that person already has symptoms, the next step is to use N95 respirators and gloves. There has been a lot of controversy recently over the effectiveness of respirators, and there are no certain answers yet. But the person who should wear one first is the patient, not the caregiver or other family members. That doesn't mean the others shouldn't wear respirators, just that you'll have less spread of the virus or bacteria if you contain it as much as possible around the patient. If the house was on fire, you wouldn't run out to the garage with the fire extinguisher--you'd aim it at the flames. So put the respirator on the patient(s) first. This has the added advantage of protecting the patient from germs that the caregiver might bring in. Many people don't know the difference between a surgical mask and a respirator. In the case of the cheaper respirators, the ones that don't have a good seal around the wearer's face, there unfortunately isn't much difference except for price. The filter media of the respirator may filter out 95% of airborne particles (which is where the N95 nomenclature comes from), but if air is infiltrating around the edges of the mask, it doesn't matter how good a job the filter media is doing. Here are pictures of several kinds of surgical masks and respirators, however, to give you an idea of what they look like. These do not include the very expensive biohazard respirators, only the ones commonly found in health care settings and available to buy in drugstores. It's essential that the respirator be fitted as closely as possible around the face of the wearer. The vented respirator makes it easier to do this, since exhaled breaths go through the vent, not around the edges of the mask. But they are more expensive. Even worse, at this writing it's almost impossible to find N95 respirators anywhere but at the hardware store. As far as I'm aware, the ones that are sold to protect people from drywall dust are the same quality as the ones sold specifically for medical use. The drugstores are currently sold out of respirators, but the last time I checked, all the hardware store still had shelves full of them. Follow the directions about the length of time to wear a disposable respirator. Most of them say not to wear one for more than a single day of continuous use, or no more than two days of intermittent use. The filter media can get clogged up in a very dusty environment, making it essentially useless. What if you're caught with no respirators, or even surgical masks? It's possible to make them from several layers of cotton knit, such as t-shirts. This CDC article describes a mask made with a single heavy-duty Hanes t-shirt, cut and layered to put several layers over the nose, with two sets of ties to go over the head and neck. It may require some fiddling to improve the fit, but it's definitely better than nothing. Gloves are also essential if you have to deal with an infected person. Even if the spread of an illness is primarily by airborne droplets, anything that person touches is likely to be contaminated. The current swine flu has been shown to survive for several hours on dry surfaces. So make sure you have gloves in your stash of medical goods. If someone in the family is allergic to latex, or to the powder in powdered gloves, buy latex-free and/or non-powdered gloves. Be aware that latex allergies can develop over time, so if one person in the family is already allergic to latex, it's possible that others might develop the allergy later, especially after prolonged glove usage. Nitrile gloves are more expensive, but don't come with built-in risks. At this writing, gloves are still widely available, both online and in local drugstores and supermarkets. It doesn't seem to have occurred to many people that gloves may be just as important as masks, so there hasn't been the same kind of demand for them. If you can't buy gloves, be prepared to wash your hands a lot. Plain soap and water do a good job. You don't have to disinfect your skin. Operating-room sterility isn't necessary. What you have to do is reduce the quantity of infectious organisms to a small number. You're much more likely to get respiratory viruses replicating in your system if you have millions of them on your hands than if you have only a few hundred or some other statistically insignificant number. Vigorous hand-washing with soap (rub your hands together for as long as it takes to recite the alphabet slowly, or to count to 50, for example) will kill and/or wash away most infectious organisms. But you have to do a good job of it each time, and you have to do it after every time you touch a potentially contaminated surface. If you have to care for an ill person, make a habit of washing your hands every time you walk away from the person, and before you touch things that other family members will handle, like door knobs or faucet handles. You can operate a lever handle with the back of your hand, for example, which is unlikely to have come in contact with contaminated surfaces. If your water faucets have to be operated by turning the handle, designate a particular tissue or washcloth to be used for that purpose so you don't contaminate the handle while you're trying to wash your hands. After you have washed your hands, the handle can be turned off with your bare hands, and it will then also be safe for others in the family to use. The lotion described on the Cleaning page is good to put on your hands after washing them. Contaminated surfaces seem to have accounted for many of the swine flu cases so far. Transmission between family members, and between school children, has been higher than between any other two groups. If aerosolized droplets were the primary vector, we would expect people to be getting sick from being in the same subway car, or bus, or elevator, or shopping center, as ill people. This doesn't seem to have been the case so far, though that may well change over the course of this summer (2009). Dealing with contaminated surfaces is a two-fold problem. You may be able to clean surfaces in your own home, but you can't disinfect everything in the world. So you need to be aware of how you are transmitting viruses or bacteria from contaminated surfaces to yourself. |
