The three-leaf triads of poison ivy are common in North America except in cities and deserts. Most people I know have had the rash. Native remedies treated it topically with a plant that grew nearby: jewelweed. Modern workers have guessed that jewelweed’s secret was lawsone, a red dye that binds to proteins and is also …
Monthly Archives: July 2019
One-Bout Wonders
Some decades back I had hay fever of epic proportions one weekend. I’d never heard of Chlor-trimeton® but the label sounded good, and the drug worked wonders immediately. That was my one and only real success with it. It didn’t do much later for allergy flare-ups. Fast-forward twenty years, and someone recommended Echinaceae when I …
Hawking the Good Stuff
My folks relocated a few weeks before I entered high school. The house we moved into was an inglorious shade of brown mustard that Mom described as pumpkin-colored. She tolerated it until the day when Dad – with farm-bred slyness – called it “cat-manure yellow”. After that she’d settle for nothing but gleaming white, so …
Children & Cancer
A recent study of 200 nations (i.e., the world) estimates that although 400,000 children contract cancer every year, almost 50% are never diagnosed or treated. This is based on a statistical model because registry data is spotty. Only 3% of pediatric cases go undiagnosed in Europe and America, thus the numbers elsewhere are often much …
On Rats & Multiplication
Here in the South we get our share of troubling wildlife: fire ants, black widows, brown recluses, the occasional scorpion, and all four types of North American poisonous snakes. Then there are the gators, black bears, and other predators in the hinterlands. Of course, the assortment out west is sobering, too: grizzlies and brown bears …
Circling-V ™ 