Herbs for First Aid

When you have a medical emergency you can also look to herbal remedies for First

Aid.

 

When it comes to an emergency such as insect bite and sting your best course of action is to make a compress out of charcoal. This can be immediately applied to the bite or sting to help reduce inflammation. The herb lobelia is also helpful.

 

You can also buy calendula ointment in natural health food stores to soothe stings and bites.

 

Otherwise your best bet is to not be bit in the first place. Goldenseal and tea tree oil are natural insecticides. Pennyroyal oil is also an insecticide.

 

To repel insects try burning citronella candles or you can buy commercial bug repellent oil prepared for the skin to keep away bugs.

 

Everyone at one time or another suffers from this painful condition that is caused by too much exposure to the sun or even minimal exposure to the sun while taking drugs that cause photosensitivity such as antibiotics or antidepressants.

 

Probably the most effective herbal treatment for sunburn is aloe vera, which is a remarkably great treatment for any kind of burn. You can simply take pulp from the fresh plant and apply it as needed.

 

You can also buy salves for sunburn that are made of calendula and St. John Wort, which can help to soothe the pain and promote healing.

 

Taking a bath that contains six drops of chamomile oil or lavender oil will also help to soothe sunburned skin.

 

A cotton gauze soaked in gotu kola tea can also help reduce the inflammation from sunburn.

 

Supplementing your child's with horsetail, which is a good source of silica, can help aid in tissue repair.

 

If you have a toothache you should see a dentist immediately. However there are a few herbal remedies that can be helpful for the pain and inflammation in the meantime.

 

Calendula, chamomile, peppermint and yarrow are all natural anti-inflammatory so rinsing your mouth with the tinctures or teas of these herbs may help.

 

Clove oil is helpful for toothache pain. Apply one or two drops with a cotton swab as needed.

 

Alcohol free goldenseal extract can be used as an antibacterial mouthwash until you can get yourself  or your kid to the dentist

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Antibiotics Keep You and Your Kids Sick

By now you have probably heard just a little bit about how Americans are overusing antibiotics for common ailments and how this is leading to a concern about the entire population eventually becoming immune to the positive effects of the drugs.
People are loading tons of antibiotics into their systems, often with no benefit except to the manufacturers of antibiotics. The end result is not pretty in terms of what we are doing to our collective immunity against the big diseases, which of course mutate more and more every day into super bugs.
Do you really want to be part of this trend towards lowering humanity's resistance to disease? All of this over prescribing of antibiotics is leading to even more resistant bacteria.
We also perpetrate stronger strains of fungus and bacteria the more we allow ourselves to be medicated with antibiotics.
Women and children who take several rounds of antibiotics a year to treat things liked bacterial vaginosis, bladder infections and earaches are among the most chronically sick in society.
Is there an alternative? -The alternative is to wake up and realize that life style changes, not magic bullets are the key to getting of this treadmill of antibiotic intolerance.
In a very wide variety of complaints, doctors may prescribe antibiotics without a clear indication of a “bug” that is susceptible to antibiotics – “just in case”. The problem is that sometimes there are no bacteria to kill, only a virus. Antibiotics simply do not work on viruses – only bacteria.
That is why it is so crucial for you to make sure that you are actually suffering from bacterial vaginoisis and not infectious vaginosis which is caused by sexually transmitted viruses. Viruses simply will not respond to antibiotics and you will be lowering your resistance and immunity for no good reason.
Worse yet, people without proper medical training may push antibiotics or misguided persons may “self-medicate” with them. One really nasty habit is to never finish the initial round of antibiotics that was prescribed you. The reason this is a disaster is because every time you do this you give the bug time to mutate and overcome the power of the antibiotic.
The result in the long run is a massive amount of the population developing severe allergies to atibiotics that normally would treat even non-life threatening conditions.

Over the long term your immune system may become compromised and you will find yourself donating even more money to the pharmaceutical companies to treat the following conditions that are caused by the overuse of antibiotics –

• Bad breath
• Depletion of helpful intestinal bacteria
• Chronic candida yeast overgrowth
• Chronic urinary tract infections
• A lowered resistance to viruses, fungus and bacteria
The 'prescribing antibiotics' just in case approach to life is bringing super bugs and their damaging consequences closer to the fore. We are not far away from the day when a new strain of BV that is not curable at all by existing antibiotics.

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