Category Archives: Medical References

Dangerous Household Ozone Generators

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Last month I looked up information about in-home ozone generators. A friend of mine was thinking of buying a house in Arizona (she bought it), and the sellers were using indoor ozone generators. The ozone gave my friend a severe headache and caused her blood pressure to rise to dangerous levels. (She takes blood-pressure medication and had to increase the dosage after inspecting the house.)

I rushed to my computer and found quite a few useful websites, and, yes, ozone causes headaches, high blood pressure, sore throats and coughs (see Effects of Ozone Pollution on Seniors and Ozone Generators May Be Dangerous to Your Health). Ozone irritates the lungs, exacerbates lung disease, accelerates aging, and damages home electronics and wiring. In combination with air fresheners or household disinfectants, ozone will produce formaldehyde, a chemical that can cause cancer (see Study Warns of Cleaning Product Risks). The California Department of Health Services began warning consumers about indoor ozone generators back in the 1990s. And Health Canada says, “If you have an ozone generator in your home, stop using it.” read more

Avoiding BPA in Plastic

For a good article on plastics and BPA (Bisphenol A), see this National Wildlife Federation Article. The authors identify the plastic products that contain BPA and they tell you how avoid them.

Beware of Advice from Meetup.com Members

If you join a Meetup.com activity, let’s say a hiking group, and you hear the members giving out impromptu advice regarding survival, health, injury, etc., make sure you consult a professional, too, or at least do some reading.

You might find that at a monthly hikers’ meeting, an attractive know-it-all is showing you a stretching exercise for your sore knee. But if you go to a good physiotherapist, you might learn that the stretching will only exacerbate your knee or hip injury, that what you really need to do is build muscle strength in the injured area. read more

Tart Cherries May Help Sleep

AOL Travel has an interesting short article about how tart cherries may help fight jet lag. The cherries contain small amounts of melatonin, a hormone that co-regulates sleep patterns.

AOL: Tart Cherries

Calcium

If you are unable to eat milk products or if you are taking a medication such as prednisone, you should definitely take calcium supplements — at least 1000 mg of calcium per day, divided into 2 to 4 doses. Never take more that 500 mg of calcium at one sitting during the day: your body has a hard time utilizing more that 500 mg at a time. And I have heard that among people supplementing with calcium, cranberry juice causes kidney stones. So avoid cranberries.

You might want to take a look at EZorbOnline.com. EZorb is a “new generation” calcium supplement — it has a very high absorption rate. I believe that I can feel the effects of EZorb on my muscle tone and skeletal strength. read more

Great Resource on Herbs and Alternative Medicine

The University of Maryland Medical Center is one of the very best online references for finding out about herbs. The site comes with a variety of cross-reference tools: Conditions by Organ and Body System, Interactions by Drug, Conditions by Signs and Symptoms, Interactions by Herb or Supplement, Herbs & Supplements by Uses, and Depletions by Drug.

Desert Venom

Although a number of medical professionals still recommend applying a tourniquet to rattlesnake bites (and then briefly releasing the tourniquet every 15 to 20 minutes), Tony Nester, the author of Desert Survival Tips, Tricks, & Skills (Flagstaff: Diamond Creek Press, 2003), writes that most of the doctors he spoke to advise against applying a tourniquet (it simply concentrates the venom in the tissues immediately adjacent to the bite). Your best treatment is to get to a hospital or clinic as quickly as possible: do not delay. read more

Mesothelioma and Asbestos Information

We often hear of opportunists building rather shallow web sites around mesothelioma and asbestos so that they might obtain top dollar from contextual pay-per-click Google Adsense advertisements (Google crawls participating web sites and serves ads that match each site’s content). Or the myth is that content related to mesothelioma will bring webmasters some of the best paying Google Adsense ads.

The mesothelioma information site, www.mayoclinic.com/health/mesothelioma/DS00779, tells victims and victims’ families (and other interested parties) all about mesothelioma: what it is, how and why individuals fall victim to the disease, and the symptoms and procedures leading to diagnosis. The writers go on to point out the products that contain asbestos and the jobs that lead to asbestos exposure, and provides links to cancer centers that treat individuals suffering with mesothelioma. Available treatments (including nutritional and alternative therapies) are enumerated and explained. read more