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A natural Vaseline/Triple antibiotic cream alternative?

Hilary Duinker

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posted 3 years ago

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Hey y'all, first responder and wilderness first aid medic here, thanks for all the great herbal suggestions! I want to share a couple things I learned when I was kayak guiding related to first aid supplies. When you're guiding, it can be hard to figure out how many bandages (and of what sizes) to bring - you're usually with a larger number of people so there could be several injuries and then they all need multiple bandages if you are out for multiple days and they need changing, fall off etc. And of course there's alot of small cuts on ppls hands and most bandaids don't last in all the wetness when you are kayak touring. So you aim to minimize how many bandaids you go through, which, I mean, we should kinda be doing anyway, right? so much medical waste happening already. So what I was taught is that it's best for many small scrapes etc to just to clean well and leave alone as many have already said. A herbal goop can be helpful for larger scrapes that you think need something but can be left to scab up rather than be bandaged. The scab is of course, biology's bandaid. If the cut is bigger/deeper and/or somewhere it's likely to get grubby/needs protection, there's a type of fancy transparent bandage that you can put on and leave on for the week or so it'll take to heal and still monitor the cut -brand names Opsite and Tagaderm are ones I know of. There's also something called "friar's balsam" also known as "tincture of benzoine" that you can put on intact skin AROUND the cut to help the bandage stick better. I think it stops the skin from sweating. Whenever you are dealing with a cut it is worth taking the time to get it really clean and then bandage it really well if it needs bandaging. Letting it bleed for a bit is fine, as it does help clean it from inside out as someone else already mentioned. Deadly bleeding (gushing) is of course important to stop right away with pressure! Hope that's helpful <3

R Sumner

Posts: 41

posted 3 years ago

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Dave de Basque wrote:I will get to wound care at the end but I want to second R Summer above's recommendation of chlorine dioxide, ClO2 as a real excellent, cheap and super-useful multi-purpose thing to have around the house or homestead. I have only started having it around for the last six months and already I am really impressed with all the things I've used it for. I swear I will never be without it again.

Thanks for upvoting @Dave de Basque!

And yes, I've heard European hospitals and other institutions use commercial machines to make it on-site for surface sterilization. Apparently it is also widely used in North America to clean pesticide residue off grocery store produce.

My ClO2 + H2O prep failed yesterday due to reasons. If it suns I will try again today.

At the risk of going off-topic, what do you use to make, store and apply it? Aquarium pump and tubing or a more professional rig? Do you use metal fittings? I've noted plastic spray bottles degenerate, etc...

Brian Marshall

Posts: 3

Location: Chiang Mai, Thailand.

posted 3 years ago

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Cris Fellows wrote:

N Stephanson wrote:That's pretty surprising that antibiotic ointment actually slows healing! I never would have guessed. Thank you too for the caution against H2O2, I will stop using that. Is rubbing alcohol bad for cleaning wounds too? .

I would ditto Barukh's recommendation. I just retired as a pediatric wound care/ suture nurse, and we are herbalists here. Peroxide kills germs...and cells.

Hi Kathleen, referencing your foot photos, I don't think it is a reasonable illustration, as one is the right foot and the other the left!! Correct?

Don't rely on others for your happiness, make your own!!

S Ydok

Posts: 115

Location: A NorCal clay & rock valley

posted 3 years ago

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tiffany thrasher wrote:Usnea lichen is a known traditional medicine for stopping infections and boosting the immune system. It's an effective antibacterial (not so much antiviral or antifungal) and aids in wound healing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378874120335443

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0753332217319091

Usnea is a grey-green, fruticose lichen that hangs from trees. The easiest way to ID it is by the stretchy central "rubber band" in their thallus. They are also bushy looking, with many small hairy side branches coming off the main stem.

You can make a tincture with usnea or powder the lichen as a poultice. You can collect it from the forest (PLEASE only collect naturally fallen lichen from the ground, do not remove it from trees - it takes an incredibly long time to grow and it's very harmful to their populations to harvest it from trees)

This site is pretty helpful on some background and how to make it, but the linked studies above contradict the claims of antifungal and antiviral capabilities:

http://goodnesstea.com/blog/2018/2/15/the-herb-thats-taken-a-lichen-to-healing

We've got that stuff in a few trees! I got some in a jar I collected last year with intentions of adding it to some salve.

james cox

Posts: 100

Location: north okanagan

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posted 3 years ago

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We have a "weed" called plantain, 2 kinds; broad leaf and thin leaf, sorry don't know the true name. kinda looks like dandelion, here in the north okanagan. the leaves are really good for that sort of thing.

I'm not lost because where ever I go there I am and that light at the end of the tunnel is not a train.

Kelly Craig

Posts: 367

Location: Eastern Washington

posted 3 years ago

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I'm a fan of colloidal silver for some applications too.

It's too bad there are so many cons out there selling absurdly priced machines marketed as all but magic. In the end, electricity is electricity is electricity is. . . . You can pulse it, produce it as alternating current or direct current. You can raise and lower the voltage, amperage and, if alternating current, the frequency, but it's still electricity.

An old train set controller converts AC to DC and allows you to adjust the voltage. Using one, and a bit of pure silver, you can make your own colloidal silver. I even brewed up fifty gallons once to see if I could beat up on fungus growing on some gala apples we had. It helped, but I got side tracked before I could look into it further.

When I was brewing up the large batch, I used an aquarium pump to "stir" the water.

All that aside, I'd not drink it every day. It is a heavy metal and we were not built to make it part of our regular diet. For example, while we may need selenium, it wouldn't take much of it to kill us. Like many things, silver can be our friend, or our enemy. Merely that someone selling a used car tells us it's the best car in town does not make it so. In other words, be leery of what the person with an interest (e.g., conflict of interest) has to say about his /her product.

Karon Czekala wrote:I SWEAR by colloidal silver, preferably 10-30ppm. Think silt c. corn flakes. Silt gets into nooks & crannies best! DOn'T be dazzled by 500ppm. I bought a home brewer which I use with distilled water. I drink it straight up, alllll the time. I apply CS to any and every imaginable cut, burn, rash, sore. It's simply teeny particles of silver suspended in water. NO single cell organism can live with silver!!! Not fungus/bacteria or virus-- even the current virus making everyone nutty RN. NO, you won't turn blue unless you drink 10 gallons a day. The smurf guy was TRYinG to look like that! I bought mine thru THE NATURAL HEALTH LIBRARY on fb. Terry is the best!

Angel Bellamissio

Posts: 49

Location: United States

posted 3 years ago

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this is such a wonderful thread, thank you all for your contributions.

Dave de Basque

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Posts: 351

Location: Basque Country, Spain-43N lat-Köppen Cfb-Zone8b-1035mm/41" rain: 118mm/5" Dec., 48mm/2" July

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posted 3 years ago

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R Sumner wrote:

My ClO2 + H2O prep failed yesterday due to reasons. If it suns I will try again today.

At the risk of going off-topic, what do you use to make, store and apply it? Aquarium pump and tubing or a more professional rig? Do you use metal fittings? I've noted plastic spray bottles degenerate, etc...

Hi R, glad to oblige, my setup is pretty simple and dependable, I didn't even know there was more than one way to make it, but of course there is! The person I've found who is most serious and scientific about chlorine dioxide, its preparation and all its uses is a German/Spanish/Swiss biomedical researcher by the name of Andreas Kalcker and you can see his fairly easy preparation method here (he keeps his videos separate from his website).

Basically his recommendation is to always use all-glass containers with an airtight seal. Glass is non-reactive and doesn't deteriorate or contaminate the solution. You generate ClO2 gas from a shot glass you put inside the larger container, and it's gradually absorbed by the water in the larger container. Dissolved in water it's quite stable. The resulting solution of ClO2 in water is totally pure if you use distilled water, no contaminants and no residues. It takes 48-72 hours in my experience, you have to do the process twice. It makes about 400 ml of standardized CDS at 3000ppm, which is diluted in certain ratios for different uses -- got to read up on each protocol, which he also has on his website.

Once done, I keep the solution in the fridge. One time I tried to make it in the sun to speed up reaction time. It must have blown the seal a bit because the liquid went back to clear instead of more or less sunflower oil-colored like it is supposed to be, so I intuited the gas had all escaped due to too much pressure. I looked up the boiling point of ClO2 and it's about 11ºC or 52ºF, so that made sense. So I now do everything out of the sun and at room temperature, like he shows you to, and just wait, and once finished it goes in an airtight brown glass dropper bottle in the fridge.

Since I'm a bit of a nerd I also bought some test strips to test the final concentration of the solution. He shows that in the video too.

Another thing is that the dilute solutions you make for whatever purpose last anywhere from 3 days to a week. So best to make small batches. The undiluted solution you make above probably loses concentration over time too, but I haven't tested it to verify.

All this makes me sound like a chem nerd which is not true. I'm much more a fan of finding solutions for things based on living systems which you can grow yourself. So the other things in this thread based on plants and poultices, etc. are my usual preference. And they work! Chemical things, like colloidal silver which I discovered years ago and now chlorine dioxide which I discovered recently, which require importing some gear and raw materials, really have to prove their worth in my book. But CDS is the best stuff I've ever used for everything I've tried it for, so much so I think it's really important, so it has earned it's place in my pantry!

Tiny garden in the green Basque Country

james cox

Posts: 100

Location: north okanagan

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posted 1 year ago

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I cut my arm while sharpening my axe, abought a 2" slice, across the lower part of my bicep. Always wanted to open up. Friend of mine gave me some salve she'd made up with mullein, comfry, yarrow and broad leaf plantain in a bees wax and olive oil base. Kept it on with a bandaid at night and there is hardly even a scar now. Another friend of swears by broad leaf plantain as a healer of infections since it is what he used from when he was a kid and he's older than dirt. Might only be my 2 cents worth but sometimes dollar value is highly overrated.

I'm not lost because where ever I go there I am and that light at the end of the tunnel is not a train.

R Sumner

Posts: 41

posted 1 year ago

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>Basically his recommendation is to always use all-glass containers with an airtight seal. Glass is non-reactive and doesn't deteriorate or contaminate the solution. You generate ClO2 gas from a shot glass you put inside the larger container, and it's gradually absorbed by the water in the larger container. Dissolved in water it's quite stable. The resulting solution of ClO2 in water is totally pure if you use distilled water, no contaminants and no residues. It takes 48-72 hours in my experience, you have to do the process twice. It makes about 400 ml of standardized CDS at 3000ppm, which is diluted in certain ratios for different uses -- got to read up on each protocol, which he also has on his website.

Wow that is a long time. I generally only do one process over maybe four hours tops, but then I mostly use it in a spray bottle, so as long as it's yellow I don't bother with calculating concentrations.

Early on a buddy and I made a big batch in a giant carboy buried in a snowbank. We didn't have test strips and couldn't tell that the colour had changed, so we let it run all night. It was very powerful stuff, and yes, kept forever as I recall.

>Once done, I keep the solution in the fridge. One time I tried to make it in the sun to speed up reaction time. It must have blown the seal a bit because the liquid went back to clear instead of more or less sunflower oil-colored like it is supposed to be, so I intuited the gas had all escaped due to too much pressure. I looked up the boiling point of ClO2 and it's about 11ºC or 52ºF, so that made sense. So I now do everything out of the sun and at room temperature, like he shows you to, and just wait, and once finished it goes in an airtight brown glass dropper bottle in the fridge.

Direct UV will degenerate ClO2 very quickly. You may have cooked it out faster than it could dissolve in the warmer sunlit water.

I bubble it directly into a 4L brown glass jug in a cooler packed with ice to keep it below 11C and in the dark the whole time. I put the reaction chamber in the shade as well (outside is best for ventilation). Jug goes into our cold room at 2-8 Celsius or a DC cooler box in the summer. Chemical-rated polymer spray bottle gets refilled from the jug and also stored cold. I make a batch every couple of weeks, we go through it pretty quickly.

When I spoke about sun it was for powering the solar panels so I can run the pump :-)

Andreas Kalcker is the bomb! Thanks for digging up that link.

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