Natural wound dreassings

[Jhanananda]

I am not sure of this one, because I have never heard of anyone else doing it, but if it works, wow.

Survival Hack: How To Create Homemade Penicillin

This information I feel is very relevant to potentially everyone but specifically those whom may be living in poverty or have limited resources around the world. Oranges and simple bread are two of the most universally common household kitchen items. But did you know that oranges and bread are capable of producing penicillin simply by letting them sit around and age? Believe it or not, that green disgusting mold which develops on the surface of bread is actually called Penicillium.

It is time for a thought experiment. You are living in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. In a dash your partner has deeply slashed their leg. As you take shelter the next few days your partner begins to develop a noticeable infection. Keeping in mind that in real world cases infections can result in serious medical concerns, loss of a limb or death if left untreated, without access to modern medical supplies would you know what to do to help your partner? Here is one cheap and easy way to potentially save your partner from these fates.

-Take bread and place it in a bag or container

-Let sit until spores begin to form

-Take all the bread and break it up into smaller pieces

-Add some moisture (light misting) and place the broken up pieces back in the same sealed bag or container

-Monitor the mold growth and do not remove until the majority of the mold culture begins to turn decidedly green.

As the mold begins to grow and develop it will take on white, blue and green stages. The green mold you see in the picture above illustrates this point. The green color is going to contain doses of penicillin. As you can see the green areas are where the mold has grown the largest, essentially where it has matured. Now that you have this green mold, you can actually begin to use it as treatment. There are a few ways to go about this.

Option A: Take the bread clumps, fill up a large cup full of them and add warm water (not boiling water). Mix together and consume. Repeat as necessary, essentially as daily doses of penicillin. It is important to note that while you are growing the mold, you are most likely growing other things. Not all of them helpful. And when you consume the bread will be getting both penicillin and that bad stuff. Yes, it will also taste terrible. Does the bad outweigh the good? In the scenario above, diarrhea or upset stomach are much less serious problems compared to a major infection. So it can be worth it. This remedy has been used for thousands of years in ancient cultures and has also been seen in many folk remedies around the United States for centuries.

Option B: Take your time and carefully separate nothing but the green mold from the bread. Clean the wound, take your ‘scrapings’  from the bread and topically apply them over the whole would. Dress lightly and repeat this process regularly.

I am familiar with using honey as a wound dressing, although I have never used it.

An interesting fact I once learned studying Egyptology. Dating back to Imhotep, ancient doctors used to dress wounds with honey. Why is this? It is actually extremely hard for bacteria to grow on honey. If a wound is fresh and clean and infection free, you can apply honey to the area to preserve it from harmful bacteria. Believe it or not, medical grade honey bandages are still used in modern emergency rooms to this day. For home use simply cover the entire area in honey, and wrap the wound to both keep the honey in place and everything else away.

There are of course more advanced ways to make penicillin from bread and oranges that go beyond what I mentioned above. Perhaps if you have more time, more resources available at hand, you can indeed make potentially pharmaceutical grade penicillin using the same basic process I mentioned above. With the relatively low cost and the wide availability of penicillin in the healthcare marketplace today, this may not be practical. But find yourself in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, this information might just save your life. If you wish to know more advanced means of processing penicillium I recommend reading up on it further.

Source: anonhq

I have also used powdered herbs such as: goldenseal, or cayenne pepper, on an open and actively flowing wound on myself.  I found in both cases the herb used promoted rapid clotting and sealed up the wound with a durable scab, which allowed the wound to heal quickly and without infection.

[Jhanananda]

I like to learn something useful every day.

Penicillin
Penicillin (PCN or pen) is a group of antibiotics which include penicillin G (intravenous use), penicillin V (oral use), procaine penicillin, and benzathine penicillin (intramuscular use). They are derived from Penicillium fungi.[2]

Penicillin antibiotics were among the first medications to be effective against many bacterial infections caused by staphylococci and streptococci. Penicillins are still widely used today, though many types of bacteria have developed resistance following extensive use. All penicillins are β-lactam antibiotics.

About 10% of people report that they are allergic to penicillin; however, 90% of this group are not actually allergic.[3] Serious allergies only occur in about 0.03%.[3]

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming.[4] People began using it to treat infections in 1942.[5] There are several enhanced penicillin families which are effective against additional bacteria; these include the antistaphylococcal penicillins, aminopenicillins and the antipseudomonal penicillins.

Medical uses

The term "penicillin" is often used generically to refer to benzylpenicillin (penicillin G, the original penicillin found in 1928), procaine benzylpenicillin (procaine penicillin), benzathine benzylpenicillin (benzathine penicillin), and phenoxymethylpenicillin (penicillin V). Procaine penicillin and benzathine penicillin have the same antibacterial activity as benzylpenicillin but act for a longer period of time. Phenoxymethylpenicillin is less active against gram-negative bacteria than benzylpenicillin.[6][7] Benzylpenicillin, procaine penicillin and benzathine penicillin are given by injection (parenterally), but phenoxymethylpenicillin is given orally.
Susceptibility

While the number of penicillin-resistant bacteria is increasing, penicillin can still be used to treat a wide range of infections caused by certain susceptible bacteria, including Streptococci, Staphylococci, Clostridium, and Listeria genera. The following list illustrates minimum inhibitory concentration susceptibility data for a few medically significant bacteria:[8][9]

    Listeria monocytogenes: from less than or equal to 0.06 μg/ml to 0.25 μg/ml
    Neisseria meningitidis: from less than or equal to 0.03 μg/ml to 0.5 μg/ml
    Staphylococcus aureus: from less than or equal to 0.015 μg/ml to more than 32 μg/ml

Adverse effects

Common adverse drug reactions (≥ 1% of people) associated with use of the penicillins include diarrhoea, hypersensitivity, nausea, rash, neurotoxicity, urticaria, and superinfection (including candidiasis). Infrequent adverse effects (0.1–1% of people) include fever, vomiting, erythema, dermatitis, angioedema, seizures (especially in people with epilepsy), and pseudomembranous colitis.[10]

About 10% of people report that they are allergic to penicillin; however, 90% of this group are not actually allergic.[3] Serious allergies only occur in about 0.03%.[3]

Discovery
In 1897 a French physician, Ernest Duchesne at École du Service de Santé Militaire in Lyon, published a medical thesis entitled Contribution à l’étude de la concurrence vitale chez les micro-organismes : antagonisme entre les moisissures et les microbes (Contribution to the study in vital competition in microorganisms: antagonism between molds and microbes) in which he specifically studied the interaction between Escherichia coli and Penicillium glaucum. He independently discovered healing properties of P. glaucum, even curing infected guinea pigs from typhoid. It is not known, however, whether the active chemical in these studies was in fact penicillin. E. coli and the causative agent of typhoid are both Gram-negative bacteria and are therefore significantly less susceptible to penicillin than other, Gram-positive, bacteria.[23] Italian physician Vincenzo Tiberio from the University of Naples published a study on the effects of this mold that he saw in a well near his house in Arzano, Italy, in 1895.[24][25][26]

The discovery of penicillin is attributed to Scottish scientist and Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming in 1928.[27] He showed that, if Penicillium rubens[28] were grown in the appropriate substrate, it would exude a substance with antibiotic properties, which he dubbed penicillin. This serendipitous observation began the modern era of antibiotic discovery. The development of penicillin for use as a medicine is attributed to the Australian Nobel laureate Howard Walter Florey, together with the German Nobel laureate Ernst Chain and the English biochemist Norman Heatley.[29]

Fleming recounted that the date of his discovery of penicillin was on the morning of Friday, September 28, 1928.[30] The traditional version of this story describes the discovery as a fortuitous accident: in his laboratory in the basement of St Mary's Hospital in London (now part of Imperial College), Fleming noticed a Petri dish containing Staphylococcus that had been mistakenly left open, was contaminated by blue-green mould from an open window, which formed a visible growth.[31] There was a halo of inhibited bacterial growth around the mould. Fleming concluded that the mould released a substance that repressed the growth and caused lysing of the bacteria.[29]