I am actually terrified about home remedies regular people provide without deep understanding of human physiology and medicine.
Please refrain from providing advice to people if you're not in the position to do so unless you're a medical doctor. It sounds good hearted but this is exactly the kind of things we shouldn't be perpetuating. You can cause inadvertent loss of life in worst case.
My parents are forwarding all kinds of shit from social media from fake vaccine news to completely insane home remedies such as going to a sauna when you have fever to "kill the virus". I am not suggesting you're doing this, but just to illustrate extreme case of misinformation.
Yes, I know. I've actually been around this block before.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my 32 year old son who still lives with me. I left all the CF lists years ago because people with CF live in terror and mostly don't want to take chances on trying anything not prescribed by a doctor, even though they are facing certain death.
Doctors don't know how to fix them. When I was diagnosed in 2001, life expectancy in the US was age 36.
Like anyone who has CF or who has a loved one with CF, I know quite a lot about germ control and daily home management of potentially deadly lung problems. Unlike most people with CF, I'm currently drug free. My condition is managed with diet and lifestyle.
I think it's outright irresponsible to say nothing at all in cases where I know a thing and no one else is speaking up, even though I surely an not the only person who knows X. I've mostly spoken up to say, essentially, "If there aren't enough ventilators to go around, airway clearance techniques have been around forever and some of them are non invasive and don't require mechanical intervention. You may still have options, even if the worst comes to pass, the medical system is overloaded and you are trying to survive a deadline epidemic while locked down at home."
If you want to see my past remarks, I've added the link to that discussion to my profile. I'm disinclined to do too much cage rattling on HN in discussion.
I'm currently working on developing a blog in hopes of putting together useful information about best practices for simply avoiding germs in day-to-day life.
I think I know a lot of useful information. I don't think I'm behaving irresponsibly.
I'm still trying to sort out for myself what I think works going forward. I don't think there's anyone on the planet who can tell me what that is.
I absolutely cannot volunteer in a hospital. Cystic fibrosis puts me in a high risk category. That's like asking me to intentionally become the Typhoid Mary of covid19.
- Spread information about hygiene, CDC recommendations on how to prevent spread of Coronavirus and reiterate/ephasize the importance of washing hands/cleaning public spaces.
- Donate money to medical research, who knows, some of these home remedies may be useful. But not without getting the research done first.
You don't see the danger of providing medical advise to others? I've been wrong many times of something that I thought was intuitive to me but ultimately there was a "oh..." moment when I saw experimental results or some concrete evidence.
There is also a network effect - you say X to person Y. Person Y tells X to 10 other friends who then tell 1000 other people. The misinformation that started from you could potentially affect a lot of people and then you start having deep thoughts such as - I tested X on myself and it worked. But now 100,000 people are doing it - is it safe?
This is why you should stop from providing medical advice to others. I am saying this with respect to you and your earnest intentions from heart.
Cystic fibrosis is supposed to cost up to a quarter of a million dollars per year for medical care per patient. Two members of my household have it. I've supported us all on well under $20k annually for at least eight years and we were homeless for nearly six years.
I often have insufficient money for food. Yet, we are still alive.
I respect your genuine and valid concerns about giving advice in situations where you don't know what you are talking about. Trying to give me advice to do things like volunteer in a hospital or donate money I don't have falls in that category.
Maybe take a few minutes to at least look up cystic fibrosis before commenting further about what you think I should be doing.
I'm sure it's true that it's not intended that way, but it's coming across that way, especially when you do it 5 times. Please don't hound anyone like that on HN.
The whole point of a fever is that the higher temperature harms the disease organism more than the host organism. It is in fact to "kill the virus".
The sauna supports that. The same goes for anything else that would enable the fever of course. You could instead eat hot soup, wear a jacket, or adjust your thermostat.
Going the other way, cooling yourself to suppress a fever, blocks a natural response to infectious disease. Don't do that unless your body has overshot the proper fever temperature by a long ways, to the point that you are at risk of brain damage.
Doreen, your home health care options are good, and I appreciate your comments! You're not making ridiculous claims or pushing some off-label drugs.
I told several friends about your advice to prop up your head and back in bed when feeling shortness of breath.
Cautiously I also recommend tonic water for a cough - not because of a medical benefit, but because the bitterness makes sputum in my mouth and that soothed my sore throat. Also wasabi for a blocked nose. Normally I think cough medicine would be better, but I know that pharmacies are overloaded right now. I also think the placebo effect is very real - doing something positive might help, instead of just sitting and worrying.
Please don't recommend things for a cough that you clearly know nothing about.
Tonic water absolutely has a medical history. It's not hard at all to find that out by reading the label and doing a little online research.
It makes me extremely uncomfortable for you to talk about tonic water for a very long list of reasons.
Because it contains an actual for serious drug -- quinine -- you can get serious side effects from overusing it. These include vision problems, headache and nausea similar to migraines. IIRC, you can cause yourself permanent vision problems.
Because it's a powerful alkaloid, overuse can cause your stomach to become too alkaline. This can cause you to be unable to digest food and can result in vomiting.
The name "tonic water" is medical in origin. The bitter flavor you speak of was common to a class of medicinal herbs typically referred to as "bitters."
Quinine is a drug related to the drug currently being tested as a possible treatment for covid19: Chloroquine. So casual and uniformed use of it could create resistance in the virus, making actual medical treatment less effective in the future.
I highly recommend you keep a journal and actually read up on anything you are finding personally helpful.
I'm not here trying to tell people what to do with home remedies for casual use. My consistent framing has been "If the shit really hits the fan and doctors have nothing for you, there are other options that may make sense to gamble on if your options are take a chance or die."
I know a helluva lot about medical stuff. My mother wanted to be a doctor and she personally changed the practices of two cancer clinics when she kept my dad alive after they wrote him off for dead. I have another relative who works at the CDC and has for years.
I've been surrounded by medically knowledgeable people my entire life. I also absolutely don't hawk home remedies.
I've spent a lot of years trying to figure out if there is any way to effectively share what I know about CF and other health issues to either be helpful or to somehow get actual medical professionals and scientists to do studies.
I would love to finally have credibility and be taken seriously in the world and have actual respect.
And it matters vastly less to me than avoiding potential harm to potentially millions of people because I'm cute and charismatic and people want to be my fwend and it goes amazingly bizarre places and always has.
I know you mean well. I know you think I'm pathetic and sad and a social outcast and a poor person and you think you are doing something nice by publicly patting me on the head.
I absolutely don't see it that way. I'm extremely uncomfortable with you and other people here clearly desiring some kind of feel good emotional attachment to me personally as your primary goal of engaging me, very much at the expense of best practices for disseminating medically useful information.
The tonic water that is available without prescription is too dilute to matter as a drug. You would get the permanent vision problems after using it daily for about 500 years, except that you are unlikely to live 500 years anyway.
Historically, a gin and tonic was developed to be used as a prophylactic against malaria for British soldiers stationed in areas where malaria was a problem. So it was a medicinal drink. This is easy enough to verify:
I've done the math. I know how much tonic water you need to drink to be roughly equivalent to being prescribed quinine as a drug for medical use.
It's a lot, but not so much that you can't consume that much in a single day. I'm not posting the figures I remember here because I'm not interested in encouraging people to do something like that.
I am actively trying to promote work from home options and mostly being ignored.
I am actively trying to talk about home health care options. It's been extremely controversial, so I am reluctant to push too hard.
There's a lot of disinterest or active blow back against any attempt at a grass roots movement in the absence of sufficient leadership from the top.
Given how powerful America is, it's not unreasonable for the world at large to be concerned.