Posted on 09/14/2012 4:31:38 PM PDT by Kartographer
As a recently-retired physician who is married to a nurse-midwife, my preparedness group looks to us as the post-TEOTWAWKI hospital and medical staff. Medical progress has been exponential and even just the last decade of scientific breakthroughs can equal a century of improvement in medical treatments, surgical techniques and pharmaceuticals. However, in the years (months?) ahead, the crumbling of the infrastructure and devolution of society in general will very likely throw us back to a medical system that existed in the 19th Century.
Let’s take an example: When the U.S. was a young nation, the average woman could expect to be pregnant 10-12 times during her reproductive lifetime (no reliable means of birth control). One out of four women would not survive the pregnancy, either from issues relating to blood loss from miscarriage or childbirth or Infection (no antibiotics) following same. A myriad of other complications occurred which are treatable today but weren’t back then. I collect old medical books, and even relatively modern obstetric textbooks devoted entire chapters on how to crush a fetus’ skull in order to expedite its removal from a critically ill mother, with instruments that clearly had no other purpose. When childbirth was successful, she could expect perhaps 3-4 of her children to survive to become adults, on average, with many minor children succumbing to simple infections that had no known effective treatment at the time.
This is the grim reality that we, in modern times, will face when the inevitable happens and current medical technology and treatments are unavailable to us.
(Excerpt) Read more at survivalblog.com ...
Less than 100 years ago folks were dying (my great aunt) of milk fever. I've been to her grave.
Our food in the US is MUCH better than anywhere in the world. We can afford neurotic bitches to worry about details, instead of "Is sister dying?"
I know food. Dirt to mouth and the recycle series.
Preservatives play a role. And it keeps people alive.
/johnny
Even most food poisonings will give you fever, the runs, and maybe a rash.
But it’s the one out of twenty or so that will stone cold kill ya!
I’d eat something raw before I’d eat something canned by someone who I suspected didn’t know what they were doing.
/johnny
I was given some 'kraut' that spewed when I opened the jars... Buried now.
Couldn't explain to the benfactor that chemical/biological process, he didn't have the basic knowledge.
Sometimes you just have to stop and point, and laugh.
/johnny
http://www.prepperpodcast.com/leaked-start-trade-wars-nations-opposed-monsanto-gmo-crops/
Yeah, by your standards, I guess I do have a food fetish.
I dumped 2 cans of tomato paste yesterday, they were bulging (purchased pre-Y2K).
One thing I should mention about food poisoning is that many times it’s not the food poisoning that really makes you go downhill, it’s the diarrhea and electrolyte imbalances.
It is ESSENTIAL in a SHTF world that people know about ORT!!
Oral Rehydration Therapy. Sugar, salt, and water. Couldn’t be simpler!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2574489/posts
My Grandmother cooked in Lard and drink tea sweeten with white refined sugar like a good southern belle. Lived to 97 and was still active and sharp as one of your knives but there are people who swear white sugar is poison! And don’t even start about lard! Well if poison keeps me alive until am 97 give me a BIG bottle of it!
Read about Norman, sometime.
He was a man.
A man I would like to emulate.
Norman Borlaug.
Folks that advocate liberal positions on food production, like the Soviets.... killed millions.
Kill millons? Save billions? Easy choice for a foodie like me.
I want to be Norm.
/johnny
While the coffee brews, and I smoke my first cigarette, I greet the day with bright light from the windows and news from Free Republic.
Sometimes, depending on the news, I may barf.
After breakfast, comes the after breakfast cigarette and beer.
We move forward through the day like normal european folk, except we had a better breakfast, and they get more beer.
/johnny
johnny, you can knock off the sht. I’m a country boy and I can feed myself in a blizzard or a drought.
I don't preach to people how the liberal view of food is appropriate.
Catch a pig, eat a pig.
Afford MickeyD? Have a McMuffin for breakfast.
It ain't going to kill you.
/johnny
I used to go down to Mexico once a year and fill my stock. I haven't been in about four years though.
Mark for later reading
Mmmmm- Kimchee! I've got a couple gallons fermenting myself!
Yes. Tetracyclines can become nephrotoxic after their expiration date.
Does anyone have a rule of thumb guide to when/which different antibiotics are preferred?
Ampicillin/Augmentin/Amoxicillin for Upper respiratory infections.
Keflex for skin/skin structure and bone infections.
Tetracycline for Chlamydia, Mycoplasma, Rickettsia, spirochetal infections, and brucelosis.
Cipro for lower respiratory infections, anthrax, complicated infections.
Metronadizole for anerobic bacterial infections, amebic and giardia lamblia infections.
Just off the top of my head.....
JR,
Eating natural healthy food is not a “liberal view of food” , its the traditional way of eating food. Eating food which has been grown locally, fresh, and clean is not a fetish. Eating mass produced food full of artificial hormones assembled in a factory is a progressive concept. Yes people used to die from food borne illness. Many thousands also thrived on foods they produced and prepared in clean healthy kitchens.
People also die from cancers, allergies and diseases which are triggered by their foods. Food is more than a set of 4 minerals slapped together in some nasty restaurant kitchen. It affects the balance of our bodies and has a tremendous impact on our health and well being.
Oh and mickyD’s isn’t food.
I love you, man! ...when do you chase women?
Thanks. Now I just gotta figure out what ails me.
Actually, my kids are allergic to “cillins” so I’m left wondering what to have on hand for them and when to give them what if the SHTF.
But my real question/concern to those of you who might be farmers, is that these dairy cows have no pasture, they are confined in a very small barn, open on one end facing the road. Some things I’ve observed aside from the stench is that the cows look dirty, that while the barn has straw on its floor it often looks wet and “muddy” (I don’t think that’s mud they are walking around in), and the cows act odd IMO; I’ve seen some chewing on the wooden fence, trying to bite each other and the other day I saw a few eating straw embedded in a huge pile of manure shoveled off to one side of the pen. There is another much bigger and commercial modern dairy operation just up the road a bit with a huge pasture and the cows look healthier and happier, if cow happiness matters in terms of milk quality and safety. But unlike this small family farmer, they don’t spread cow manure on their fields; they use commercial fertilizer and commercial seeds evident from the seed signs posted along their fields.
I can’t see nor have I observed the milking operation and so I don’t know how this small farmer with his cows cramped in a small barn sanitizes the udders when milking. I don’t know if he gives his cow’s antibiotics but I certainly hope he does BTW, given the toxic stew of crap these cows live in. Personally I wouldn’t want to drink the milk that came from these cows on this farm even if it is “natural” farming.
So my question to you regarding “traditional ways” of farming is; would you buy milk from this farmer even if he is farming in an “old fashioned” and “natural” way – just because he doesn’t use “artificial” fertilizers and or doesn’t give his cows antibiotics assuming he doesn’t?
Yes people used to die from food borne illness. Many thousands also thrived on foods they produced and prepared in clean healthy kitchens…. People also die from cancers, allergies and diseases which are triggered by their foods
Yes, many thousand thrived back in the “good ole days”. Yet walk through and old graveyard sometime. Take a look at the headstones and observe how many kids didn’t live past infancy (people tended to have big families because on average, half of their kids wouldn’t live to adulthood), how many people died at an early age, how many young women died in child birth. Many people simply didn’t live long enough to die from cancer and if they had allergies, they died from them and the cause of death was often not even known; they instead died at an early age from what are now are preventable diseases thanks to antibiotics, modern medicine and improvements in nutrition and thanks much to modern farming techniques that = bigger yields at a less cost = a wider variety of more affordable and nutritious foods.
The truth is that back in the “good ole days” unless you were very wealthy, most people ate a diet of meat and potatoes and cheap grains. The meat they ate was often “salt cured” or canned, canned vegetables being loaded with salt and canned fruits being loaded with sugar BTW, and before the days of modern refrigeration and freezers and preservatives, while people who were farmers or those who had small gardens could eat fresh vegetables and fruits, they only did so only a few months out of the year, most of what the average person ate during the year was not all that fresh or even “healthy”. Were as today, I can go to my local grocery store and buy all sorts of and a wide variety of healthy fresh vegetables and fruits.
People who constantly eat at places like McDonalds and get fat and sickly off of that lousy diet, do so, not because it’s cheaper, because it isn’t, or that healthy and affordable foods aren’t available, because they are at any grocery store, but they do so because they are just plain lazy.
All that being said; I love going to the local farmers markets in my area and go often during the summer months, buying and supporting locally grown and farm fresh fruits and vegetables, and I’ve even bought meats and cheeses and baked goods from the Amish farmers markets – great stuff BTW. But I also like that I can go to my local grocery store at any time of the year and buy nutritious bananas¸ oranges, fresh greens and fresh meats 24-7. And if I want to buy “organic” and spend the extra money to do so, I can but, personally don’t think it’s worth the extra money.
Sorry for the long rambling rant but I find the whole, “we lived better back before the modern age” pretty much a fallacy and an ignorance of historical facts in many cases.
“Sorry for the long rambling rant but I find the whole, “we lived better back before the modern age” pretty much a fallacy and an ignorance of historical facts in many cases.”
Yet you use an example of modern factory farming to present your case.
The food corporations are seeking to control all means of production and they are making great progress. They are using safety and ‘for the chilldrunn’ as their primary lever but also economic controls. Where they can’t force out small farmers economically they use the government to pass laws and regulations which only the big companies can meet.
Yes there have been advances in food safety which have saved many lives. This has largely been co-opted into a means of control, which is a progressive idea.
Proper diet is essential to meeting the bodies needs. This in turn is critical for avoiding and even curing many diseases. To think you can reduce it to 4 elements is simply ignorant. Keep your body strong and you can reduce the need for antibiotics and other medicines which will not be available after TSHTF.
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