Sometimes ya gotta go old school

[theperfessor]

About six weeks ago my left heel started hurting. At first I thought it was a bruise, but after a couple of days I noticed the whole area of my heel was infected under the callous. Since I've had diabetes for thirty+ years I immediately got hold of my podiatrist and got in to see her. She drained the area and cut off a lot of callous and said the tissue under the infection was sound, no gangrene. Whew!

(My heart goes out to the members here that are facing amputations because of diabetes induced gangrene.)

Got some oral antibiotics and some gentian violet (a disinfectant) and went on my way. The lab test of the material from the infected area showed some basic bad bacteria but no MRSA; the antibiotics and topical disinfectant would deal with that.

I tried to stay off my feet to reduce pressure on the area, and within two weeks the would had healed to the size of a quarter. Doctor was happy, I was happy, all was going well. And honestly, I usually heal pretty fast from minor bacterial infections - you get a lot of nicks and cuts in a machine shop.

Trouble was, the wound would not heal any further, and I was still getting a lot of drainage, and my foot still hurt, and even though I have the summer off from my regular job I still can't stay off my feet 24/7. Went back to see the Dr. She said the tissue around the wound was still healthy, no gangrene, so she prescribed an augmented dose of oral antibiotics and some treated pads to help drain the wound.

My insurance would pay for the antibiotics, but not the $157 for a five day supply of pads. The drainage was great enough that it would soak through a pad and into my socks. And the oral antibiotics started giving me the blowing drizzles.

Then I remembered reading in one of James Herriot's books that in the days before antibiotics and other modern drugs that they used sugar to reduce swelling and soak up drainage from wounds. Now, over the years enough people, mostly women, have called me a pig, so I figured if it worked on an animal that is very close physiologically to a human it would work for me also. I started putting raw white sugar on the area and covered it with a bandage. Within about three days I noticed that some unusual looking tissue about the size of a pea seemed to be extruding from the center of the unhealed area. I kept putting on sugar, it kept pulling out the drainage and the weird tissue.

Saw my Dr. two days ago and told her what I did. She checked my foot, saw the weird tissue, and pulled it out with her forceps. It was a freaking wart! Lots of blood. (warts fool the body into making blood vessels to get nutrition to grow) My Dr. was fine with the sugar patch, suggested I try a little honey along with the sugar (raw honey has mild antibiotic properties) and told me that sometimes you just have to go "old school" when the new magic meds don't work.

Now that the wart is out the drainage is almost gone, the tissue is healing as it should, and I'm confident that within a week or two I'll be back to normal. I'm not against modern medicine, I'd have been dead a long time ago without insulin, etc., but sometimes you just have to look to the past when the new things don't work.

Don't take this as medical advice, please. I'm just sharing my experience.

[jmort]

Honey is an incredible wound treatment as is this sugar solution called "Sugardyne" - sugar mixed with betadine aka providone - iodine:
http://www.survivalblog.com/2013/06/letter-re-sugardyne-for-wound-treatment.html

You were for sure on the right track. Will look for the honey link - basically raw organic honey as I remember it.

[429421Cowboy]

Sugar and honey are great wound care tools, I have used honey on horses before and would have no problems using it on myself! Glad you got things done on your own, if you lived a little closer i'd be happy to bring you over a few gallon jugs of organic honey from our ranch to help out!
My girlfriend's grandmother has been in the hospital so many times she is allergic to nearly any antibiotic they could try and throw at her, now she treats most of her problems with garlic, honey and beer. As you said, modern medicine does have it's place, because I would have been dead years ago without the Gore-Tex patch in my heart, but old school can be the way to go sometimes!

[snuffy]

WOW, that's good to know Kieth! My type 2 diabetes was caught in my entry into the VA medical care back in 2002. A-1C was 9.5! No wonder I was always thirsty and peeing a lot!

Part of my treatment regimen at the VA is podiatry care for everything foot related. My initial appointment was because of intense heel pain. A fellow worker said go get some orthodontic inserts, he has them and it only took 2 weeks for the pain to go away. Same here, after getting fitted, no more heel pain! The podiatrist said that half the people in the world have heel spurs, but they don't bother most of us. I go every 4 months to get my toenails trimmed. The older I get, the further the toes get away from my reach!:x

[popper]

The older I get, the further the toes get away from my reach Socks too. specially when the puppy is pulling them the other direction.

[john hayslip]

The antibiotics kill of the bacteria in the gut. I'm taking them every day to prevent infections in the bad lung. I use Acidophilus from CVS at about $7 a hundred every day. All it is I think is replacement bacteria to take the place of the killed ones. works for me. Prevents the drizzles.

[Bad Water Bill]

Sugar and honey are great wound care tools, I have used honey on horses before and would have no problems using it on myself! Glad you got things done on your own, if you lived a little closer i'd be happy to bring you over a few gallon jugs of organic honey from our ranch to help out!
My girlfriend's grandmother has been in the hospital so many times she is allergic to nearly any antibiotic they could try and throw at her, now she treats most of her problems with garlic, honey and beer. As you said, modern medicine does have it's place, because I would have been dead years ago without the Gore-Tex patch in my heart, but old school can be the way to go sometimes!

IIRC your young lady is native American.

As some sort of educational project folks should start saving medicinal practices that have worked for millennia.

Back in the 60s I had an interesting conversation with my aunt. Her mother was a trained midwife from Sweden where everything was treated with natural medications. Aunt Anna told of the Chippewa medicine men stopping by my great grandmothers cabin ,some times for as long as a week. They would discuss different plants,herbs etc and their curative powers.

Aunt Anna said one of her deepest regrets was never learning just what all of those WEEDS stored in the rafters could do.

Yes EVEN the dandelion has fantastic curative power. I watched it stop a case of macular degeneration. The research clinic would not admit that a plant had stopped the loss of sight where the newest pills were failing.

Natural cures worked for 10,000 years. we need to save that valuable information before it is lost for another 10,000 years.

[**oneshot**]

Sounds like the old timers knew what they were doing with what nature provided them.

[JeffinNZ]

Sounds like you need some NZ Manuka honey. Research it and let me know if I can send you some.

[Silver Eagle]

Make absolutely sure she got all of that wart. The littlest bit left over will be the "seed" for its replacement that will soon be growing. SWMBO has a plantars wart on her foot that a doc years ago tried to remove. Did not get it all and it grew back worse than before. Now she doesn't want to go through the removal experience again.

[MtGun44]

Interesting. So somehow there was a subsurface wart. Warts are viral infections, so I hope they got it all.
Good that it didn't turn out like Old Dan Tucker - "died of a toothache in his heel." I think this is darn near
as strange.

Good to hear you got it under control, and I'll keep the sugar thing in mind.

As long as you are going old school, maybe you need a new 1911. ;-)


Bill

[bruce drake]

Honey has been found in Egyptian tombs with hieroglyphic formulas on papyrus for use as medicine on open wounds so you went back to the earliest recorded doctors prescriptions to heal that wart!

Bruce

[shooter93]

I have tried and used/use many alternative treatments for various problems. many of them work very well for people with no side effects or drug interactions. You need to do the research though. When my blood sugar rose I tried a remedy and it dropped 100 points or so well into the normal range. my doctor also told me he has never seen triglycerides drop that much so fast. He told me they need to do vastly more research into alternative medicines because some work wonders. You don't go about it hap-hazzardly but many of them are great. Back in the day doctors and hospitals weren't right around the corner.

[MakeMineA10mm]

Then I remembered reading in one of James Herriot's books that in the days before antibiotics and other modern drugs that they used sugar to reduce swelling and soak up drainage from wounds. Now, over the years enough people, mostly women, have called me a pig, so I figured if it worked on an animal that is very close physiologically to a human it would work for me also. I started putting raw white sugar on the area and covered it with a bandage. Within about three days I noticed that some unusual looking tissue about the size of a pea seemed to be extruding from the center of the unhealed area. I kept putting on sugar, it kept pulling out the drainage and the weird tissue.

Saw my Dr. two days ago and told her what I did. She checked my foot, saw the weird tissue, and pulled it out with her forceps. It was a freaking wart! Lots of blood. (warts fool the body into making blood vessels to get nutrition to grow) My Dr. was fine with the sugar patch, suggested I try a little honey along with the sugar (raw honey has mild antibiotic properties) and told me that sometimes you just have to go "old school" when the new magic meds don't work.

Now that the wart is out the drainage is almost gone, the tissue is healing as it should, and I'm confident that within a week or two I'll be back to normal. I'm not against modern medicine, I'd have been dead a long time ago without insulin, etc., but sometimes you just have to look to the past when the new things don't work.

Don't take this as medical advice, please. I'm just sharing my experience.

This is the epitome of common sense. Your common sense IQ must be off the charts! :)

[Zymurgy50]

To get rid of warts, cut a patch of duct tape and cover the wart for six days, remove it for one day and repeat.
Got that one from the family doctor a few years back, called to make an appointment to have a wart removed from my daughters knee. Dr's assistant asked the Dr, and then the Doc got on the phone and told me to try it. Saved me an office call and in two weeks the wart was gone.

[429421Cowboy]

Bill, yes, she is Blackfeet (I have a little but not enough to count) and her gramma lived and worked on the reservation until she retired a few years back, they have some powerful tools both medical and spiritual that I am not afraid to say I trust more than modern ideas most of the time!

Keith, my other side of the family is Armenian, believe in honey and yogurt to treat 99% of life's ailments. We call yogurt madzoon and one thing it is REALLY good at is restoring the good bacteria in your stomach after taking so much antibiotics. I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier but whenever I am on them I also make sure I eat lots and lots of yogurt to stay in fighting shape! I like to buy a little organic plain yogurt then use that to make my own from then on, just by adding a little more whole milk in a simple process, and saving a little each time as starter like sourdough. Then it is easy to mix with your favorite jam or jelly to flavor, or warm up some honey and stir it in. Hope this helps you some!

[GaryN]

My mother-in-law always used the fat part of smoked bacon to draw off infection. She even used it once on my nephew. He shot himself in the foot with a 22LR. The doctor treated it but the infection never would leave. She put on some bacon and bandaged it up. Within a few days a piece of tennis shoe was pulled out by the bacon.

[theperfessor]

Hey Cowboy, I plan to eat a lot of yogurt and cheese in the near future. I have some upcoming surgery that will require a lot of bone regrowth and I need to stock up on calcium before and during the recovery process. I don't want to have my body pull calcium from my bones to heal.

PS - Hope you get the rest of your stolen goods back, thieves are the scum of the earth in my book.

[kenyerian]

Good luck with your upcoming surgery. I'm a Type II diabetic . It came from my dad's side of the family. I remember my grandmother suffering from it back in the 50's. She lost a leg before she passed away. Horrible disease.

[gbrown]

My dad believed in common sense/herbal remedies. Rarely went to a doctor. I remember one time he was opening oysters and dang near ran an oyster knife thru his palm. My wife, kids and I arrived to see him doing something and bloody paper towels all over the place. My wife, a nurse for a physician asked about it all and he showed her the wound. She was all wrapped around the axle about the emergency room and stitches and such. He was packing it with cayenne pepper. He made a bandage with rags for compression and ties, and in a week, it was closed and healing, no infection. For those that don't know, oyster mud and gunk and is like the epitomy of bacterial infection. Several years ago, we had an FDA induced scare of salmonella in red pepper, with the recall of tons of it. Bacteria in red pepper, yeah, I laughed so hard I almost upchucked.

[Hickory]

Might be a good idea to list some of the old time cures here, as I don't think the "Affordable Care Act" will as good as a midwife or an Indian medicine man in another 12-15 years.

[Bad Water Bill]

Something from Sweden.

Filabunk is like yogurt. From time to time the town in Wisconsin would loose the starter. Now it was up to the old timers to write back to Sweden for new starter. IIRC They would receive an envelope with some sort of spores that were mixed with FRESH COWS MILK.

A slightly different name or not(I never learned Swedish) but good instructions.http://www.kerrysgarden.us/2008/07/20/filmjolk-aka-swedish-yogurt/

My wife (a research chemest) worked up her own strain that could be frozen and left in the freezer for up to 6 months before warming up. It took a week or so of restarting every day till it was back to full strength again. Eaten as is or mix in fresh fruit and enjoy.

Unfortunately all of my old sources are now in a better place. Perhaps someone from Minnesota can help out.

Enjoy and good health.