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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 sev

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.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
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.
- burfog 7y ago
  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.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic https://flaviar.com/blog/gin-tonic-history https://flaviar.com/blog/gin-tonic-history http://activehistory.ca/2012/08/gin-and-tonic-a-short-history-of-a-stiff-drink/ http://activehistory.ca/2012/08/gin-and-tonic-a-short-histor... 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.
    - burfog 7y ago
      That tonic, used by British soldiers, is not available. You can get something with less than 1% of the concentration.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

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.

burfog 7y ago
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.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic https://flaviar.com/blog/gin-tonic-history https://flaviar.com/blog/gin-tonic-history http://activehistory.ca/2012/08/gin-and-tonic-a-short-history-of-a-stiff-drink/ http://activehistory.ca/2012/08/gin-and-tonic-a-short-histor... 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.
  - burfog 7y ago
    That tonic, used by British soldiers, is not available. You can get something with less than 1% of the concentration.