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Across the Fence:  What if?? Are you prepared?  |
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Mikki
True Blue Farmgirl
1510 Posts
Mikki
Austin
Indiana
USA
1510 Posts |
 Posted - May 01 2009 : 11:31:03 PM
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The swine flu has been found here in Indiana but I haven't caught the news much today to know whats going on but I've told my son to wash and wash again too. He said they have hand sanitizer in every class and finally have soap in the bathrooms. I said finally? I can't believe they didn't already have soap in the bathroom. Not sure whats up with that but Im gonna be finding out.
~~Blessings, Mikki Jo
"Courage is being scared to death... but saddling up anyway" ***John Wayne
http://main.acsevents.org/goto/iloveyoumom
http://burningmeadowsprings.blogspot.com/
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Alee
True Blue Farmgirl
22941 Posts
Alee
Worland
Wy
USA
22941 Posts |
Posted - May 02 2009 : 04:52:35 AM
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EWWWW Mikki! I mean I know kids aren't always the best about washing hands- but not to even provide soap to begin with! EWWW!
We did a Costco run, but not because of the flu, but because we needed it. I was surprised to see how many people were there in the middle of the weekday- but I didn't hear anyone worrying about the flu. We do have the staples on hand and it should be about a year before we run out of TP again! 
Alee
Farmgirl Sister #8
www.awarmheart.com
www.farmgirlalee.blogspot.com
www.allergyjourneys.blogspot.com
Put your pin on the farmgirl map! www.farmgirlmap.blogspot.com |
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CherryMeDarlin
True Blue Farmgirl
602 Posts
Cherry
Odenville
AL
USA
602 Posts |
Posted - May 02 2009 : 09:41:53 AM
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I'm with you, Alee, on that tp issue! It's what always comes to mind for me whenever I think of "stocking-up". Down here in the South we are known to make runs on stores for milk and bread whenever there's the slightest chance we MIGHT get snow. I've never understood that. I've always thought that I could do without bread or milk 'cause there's other things to eat and drink, but what're you gonna substitute for tp? 'Course I always get the bread & milk, too. Who am I to break tradition?
Mikki, our schools don't have soap in the bathrooms, either. I was told it was because of cost cuts and because of how big a mess the kids make with it. I argued the point as long as I could then just gave up when I realized I was beating a dead horse and went and bought my baby girl little bottles of hand sanitizer. Now whether she actually uses it or not, your guess is as good as mine!
~~Cherry~~
"A thing is as simple or as complicated as you make it." --TT Murphy |
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Alee
True Blue Farmgirl
22941 Posts
Alee
Worland
Wy
USA
22941 Posts |
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5 acre Farmgirl
True Blue Farmgirl
1007 Posts
~~~*Terri*~~~
WA.
USA
1007 Posts |
Posted - May 02 2009 : 6:53:27 PM
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Same as the others....Flu is flu, not?
But, if quarantined, we could live for 3 or 4 weeks on what I have home canned and stored....
Farmgirl Sister #368
"It is most common for man to value most what has least worth."
My Farm and Garden blog....
http://blogonthefarmandgarden.blogspot.com
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NikkiBeaumont
True Blue Farmgirl
473 Posts
473 Posts |
Posted - May 02 2009 : 7:09:27 PM
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LOL, Cherry, on the bread and the milk. WHAT is up with that? All I can guess is that they expect to be reduced to eating sandwiches and cereal. And you are right, it is ingrained into our being. When I hear a snow forecast I automatically think "buy milk and bread", even as I have an opposite thought that there are probably a bunch of reactionaries clearing out the shelves at that same moment. I am disgusted with myself for being so easily programmed to follow the herd. Ha!
Well, talking about a substitute for TP. My mom had to tell her boss that the restroom at work was running low on TP, and since he knew that we were going to the Cornbread Festival he put in an order for us to bring back some corncobs! I didn't see any there, but I wish that I had a handy supply of them around. I would have loved to have hand delivered a bag to their office. Here's something, I know what he is going to get for Christmas!
Farmgirl Sister #554 |
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KJD
True Blue Farmgirl
402 Posts
402 Posts |
Posted - May 02 2009 : 7:28:26 PM
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| On the t-p issue - I stock up on that, and tampons...would really hate to be without, in case of emergency! I find myself buying a box almost every time I go to Target...I'm 45, so i'll probably end up donating to younger friends or the food pantry at some point! |
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Mikki
True Blue Farmgirl
1510 Posts
Mikki
Austin
Indiana
USA
1510 Posts |
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Niamh
True Blue Farmgirl
140 Posts
Idaho
140 Posts |
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mulegirl
True Blue Farmgirl
184 Posts
rosemary
cottonwood pass
co
USA
184 Posts |
Posted - May 03 2009 : 07:35:15 AM
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Some thing to think about... Have you heard about the placebo effect? Basically it means if you believe in something, that's what you get. So if you believe you are in danger of the flu you are more likely to get it, but the opposite is true, if you believe you are healthy and fine, you will be.
This is an article from the Washington Post on placebo and it's opposite, nocebo effect.
The Nocebo Effect: Placebo's Evil Twin
By Brian Reid
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 30, 2002; Page HE01
Ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn't hold such fatalistic views.
The higher risk of death, in other words, had nothing to with the usual heart disease culprits -- age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick.
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That study is a classic in the annals of research on the "nocebo" phenomenon, the evil twin of the placebo effect. While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect experience the opposite. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that's just what they get.
"They're convinced that something is going to go wrong, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Arthur Barsky, a psychiatrist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital who published an article earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association beseeching his peers to pay closer attention to the nocebo effect. "From a clinical point of view, this is by no means peripheral or irrelevant."
Barsky's target is drug side effects, which cost the U.S. health system more than $76 billion a year, according to a 1995 University of Arizona study. If even a small percentage of those costs are caused by patient expectations of harm, addressing the nocebo effect could save a nifty sum.
But convincing doctors that their patients' problems may be more than biochemical is no simple trick. The nocebo effect is difficult to study, and medical training leads doctors to seek a bodily cause for physical ills.
"Nocebos often cause a physical effect, but it's not a physically produced effect," said Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs who studies the ways that expectations influence what people experience. "What's the cause? In many cases it's an unanswered question."
Looking for Trouble
The word nocebo, Latin for "I will harm," doesn't represent a new idea -- just one that hasn't caught on widely among clinicians and scientists. More than four decades after researchers coined the term, only a few medical journal articles mention it. Outside the medical community, being "scared to death" or "worried sick" are expressions that have long been part of the popular lexicon, noted epidemiologist Robert Hahn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Is such language just hyperbole? Not to those who accept, for example, the idea of voodoo death -- a hex so powerful that the victim of the curse dies of fright. While many in the scientific community may regard voodoo with skepticism, the idea that gut reactions may have biological consequences can't be simply dismissed.
"Surgeons are wary of people who are convinced that they will die," said Herbert Benson, a Harvard professor and the president Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston. "There are examples of studies done on people undergoing surgery who almost want to die to re-contact a loved one. Close to 100 percent of people under those circumstances die."
But the nocebo effect can lead to more subtle outcomes as well.
Fifteen years ago, researchers at three medical centers undertook a study of aspirin and another blood thinner in heart patients and came up with an unexpected result that said little about the heart and much about the brain. At two locations, patients were warned of possible gastrointestinal problems, one of the most common side effects of repeated use of aspirin. At the other location, patients received no such caution.
When researchers reviewed the data, they found a striking result: Those warned about the gastrointestinal problems were almost three times as likely to have the side effect. Though the evidence of actual stomach damage such as ulcers was the same for all three groups, those with the most information about the prospect of minor problems were the most likely to experience the pain.
Despite the smattering of doctors' anecdotal reports and a few modest clinical studies, research on the phenomenon has not been robust, mostly for ethical reasons: Doctors ought not to induce illness in patients who are not sick.
Changing ethical standards have made it difficult to even repeat some of the classic nocebo experiments. In one century-old effort, conducted long before anyone thought up the word nocebo, doctors set an allergy sufferer wheezing by showing an artificial rose, proving that at least some aspect of the allergic response is stimulated by visual cues. In a study from the early 1980s, 34 college students were told an electric current would be passed through their heads, and the researchers warned that the experience could cause a headache. Though not a single volt of current was used, more than two-thirds of the students reported headaches.
Medical Distrust
But resistance to in-depth study of the nocebo effect rests on more than ethical reservations, said the CDC's Hahn. Belief, he said, does not have a strong place in the anatomy-centered world of modern medicine.
"The fact is that phenomena that essentially come down to what people believe are conceptually difficult in our medical system," Hahn said. "Health is thought to be a biological phenomenon. More psychosomatic elements are hard to deal with."
Science is wearing away at the wall between mind and body. With the aid of high-tech imaging devices, neurologists are getting better at taking pictures of the brain in action. In one blinded study last year, researchers found that patients with Parkinson's disease given a placebo released a brain chemical called dopamine, just as the brain exposed to an active drug would do.
That flood of brain chemicals, it appears, has everything to do with what the mind expects. In most cases, like the Parkinson's study, the outcome is positive -- the placebo effect in action. But for some patients -- depressed, wary of medication or worried about drug side effects -- getting a prescription filled is an angst-ridden experience. And such patients appear even more likely to exhibit those side effects.
Barsky has even sketched out a profile of the kind of patient likely to experience the nocebo effect -- worse side effects and poorer outcomes -- on a given drug. When Barsky sees a patient with a history of vague, difficult-to-diagnose complaints who is sure that whatever therapy is prescribed will do little to battle the problem, he says, those low expectations are inevitably met. The treatments usually fail.
"Whether you trust your doctor or not probably makes a huge difference in whether you report side effects, but there's almost no data on that," Barsky said. He hopes to include information about a person's psychology in an upcoming placebo-controlled clinical trial to see if patients with a particular outlook on life fare better or worse than other subjects.
Far more esoteric factors may also shape both the placebo and nocebo response. A Dutch study, for example, found that most people considered red and orange pills to be stimulating, with blue and green-colored pills more likely to have a depressant effect.
"One of the most important things about a pill is [its] color," said Daniel Moerman, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has studied the placebo and nocebo effects across different cultures. "That seems to be fairly widespread."
But the mind is a funny thing, and generic responses to color go just so far in explaining the placebo or nocebo response. Consider this: In Italy, Moerman says, blue placebos made excellent sleeping pills for women but had the opposite effect on men.
The apparent reason? "The Italian national football team's color is azzurri," he said. "Blue."
Brian Reid is a Washington area freelance writer.
smile, follow your heart and don't look back
http://web.mac.com/rosemaryart |
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Celticheart
True Blue Farmgirl
811 Posts
Marcia
WA
USA
811 Posts |
Posted - May 06 2009 : 8:10:28 PM
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Wow! All of that is so very true. I've been a nurse for 35 years and I could tell you some stories. I once gave and injection to a biker who had been in an accident and had a pretty bad case of road rash. He didn't ask me what it was and I didn't tell him but it was the best pain med he'd ever had. It lasted my entire 8 hour shift and beyond. It was Penicillin. Plus I'm married to a man who should never be given the paper with the prescription that lists the possible side effects or adverse reactions. He will get every one of them.
I also believe you should never say out loud that you feel sick because as soon as you do you've claimed it and you will get sick for sure. Sometimes you shouldn't even think it. Much along the lines of the book The Secret.
Marcia--(yes I do realize just how strange that last statement sounds)
It's not about being perfect, but enjoying what you do. Set aside time to be creative.
Robyn Pandolph
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mulegirl
True Blue Farmgirl
184 Posts
rosemary
cottonwood pass
co
USA
184 Posts |
Posted - May 06 2009 : 8:25:44 PM
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Hi Marcia,
THE SECRET was pretty good, have you ever read or heard about Bruce Lipton? He has some good utube talks, but I read his book THE WISDOM OFYOUR CELLS:HOW YOUR BELIEFS CONTROLL YOUR BIOLOGY. Really interesting.
Funny about your husband and side effects, but isn't it true with most of the general public?
I totally agree with your last statement..and it isn't just saying stuff out loud, it is thoughts, too!
happy thoughts!
Rosemary
smile, follow your heart and don't look back
http://web.mac.com/rosemaryart |
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Celticheart
True Blue Farmgirl
811 Posts
Marcia
WA
USA
811 Posts |
Posted - May 06 2009 : 8:38:04 PM
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No I haven't. I'll look him up. It sounds very interesting. You know my DH thinks I'm nuts when I start talking like this.
It's not about being perfect, but enjoying what you do. Set aside time to be creative.
Robyn Pandolph
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mulegirl
True Blue Farmgirl
184 Posts
rosemary
cottonwood pass
co
USA
184 Posts |
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CherryMeDarlin
True Blue Farmgirl
602 Posts
Cherry
Odenville
AL
USA
602 Posts |
Posted - May 07 2009 : 12:14:26 PM
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I believe we have yet to fully understand the power of our thoughts, so I totally agree with you, Marcia. I've read The Secret and was struck by how much of it is Biblical-based, whether the authors intended it or not. A lot of it has to do with faith and believing, sure, but I think our reality, to a large degree, follows the path of our thoughts. Why else would we be charged to "think on these things" in Phillipians, "true and honorable and right", "pure and lovely and admirable", "excellent and worthy of praise"? And several times in the Bible we're instructed to "rebuke" a thing. It all goes hand-in-hand. The power of suggestion. The power of our thoughts. The power of our choices. The power of our words. We're some pretty powerful beings, huh?
Oh, and my DH sometimes thinks I'm nuts, too. You aren't alone in that! 
~~Cherry~~
"A thing is as simple or as complicated as you make it." --TT Murphy |
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Celticheart
True Blue Farmgirl
811 Posts
Marcia
WA
USA
811 Posts |
Posted - May 08 2009 : 10:47:36 AM
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I've watched the first half of the video with Bruce Lipton on Youtube. It's very good so far.
I'm with you Cherry. I firmly believe that we create our own reality by our thoughts, our words and our actions. I've also known one other person named Cherry. She was my ex-husband's second wife. I really liked her.
Rosemary.....yes my DH is a great guy. His mom died when he was 10 and he was raised by his grandparents. One time I made him mad by telling him it was pretty obvious that he was raised by 'old people.' He asked me what that was supposed to mean. It was just an observation but I know that his grandma used to run to the doctor for every little thing, real or imagined. He's not so much that way anymore.
It's not about being perfect, but enjoying what you do. Set aside time to be creative.
Robyn Pandolph
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mulegirl
True Blue Farmgirl
184 Posts
rosemary
cottonwood pass
co
USA
184 Posts |
Posted - May 08 2009 : 1:17:20 PM
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Hi Marcie,
An old wise friend once told me EVERYTHING begins with a thought, and it has stuck in my head...when you think (a thought!) about it it makes sense.
It is cool and abit sad your husband was raised by his grandparents. Sad he didn't have his mom and dad, but in a way so special he had a unique experience. I love my mom's parents so much with their farm and orchard and evey type of animal. It would have been interesting if they raised me. Sometimes I feel like I was raised by old people as my mom was 36 and dad was 42 when they had me, and even today everyone has grandparents the same age as my parents!
Enjoy
Rosemary
smile, follow your heart and don't look back
http://web.mac.com/rosemaryart |
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Across the Fence: What if?? Are you prepared? |
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What if?? Are you prepared?
