When it comes to emergency medicine for preppers, everybody is already aware of the extraordinary usefulness of things like nano silver, fish antibiotics and off-the-shelf antiseptics such as povidone iodine.
Here, I’ve decided to reveal five little-known emergency medicine items you probably never thought about acquiring for your preps. These are all lifesaving items that most people may not even realize are medicine in the first place.
Emergency Medicine Item #1: Manuka Honey
Manuka honey is Mother Nature’s perfect wound dressing. Produced by honey bees that feast on the flowers of melaleuca bushes, Manuka honey has remarkable antiseptic properties that even the FDA recognizes as medicine.
Manuka honey seals wounds like a natural bandage, keeping out bacteria and aerosolized viruses. When used with wound dressings, it makes an extremely effective wound treatment for victims of burns, cuts or scrapes. (Colloidal silver is also very effective in this way.)
Unlike other emergency medicines, you can actually EAT this medicine, too. Manuka honey is its own delicious source of calories and valuable internal medicine that helps boost immune function and fight bad bacteria in your gut. Because it’s both food and medicine, it’s astonishingly valuable as a barter item.
The best part of all is that honey stores practically forever — literally for thousands of years. There is no “shelf life” concern for honey in a human lifetime. So every dollar you invest in Manuka honey preps today is a dollar that will maintain its value for generations… even centuries.
For emergency first aid use, I like the Manuka honey in small packets as shown below:
Emergency Medicine Item #2: Activated Charcoal
Activated charcoal is another astonishingly diverse “medicine” with an impressive number of uses. It’s actually the No. 1 ingredient in emergency room poison control liquids given to patients. You can literally drink activated charcoal when mixed with water. (Tip: It will turn everything in your mouth black until you thoroughly rinse.)
Activated charcoal is an adsorbent material. This means its properties include a unique physical structure that attracts and binds with many poisons, pesticides and toxic heavy metals. In fact, activated charcoal is one of the key components in most off-the-shelf water filters because of its ability to bind with a surprising array of toxins.
That’s also why activated charcoal is used in fish aquarium filtration systems. Fish are extremely susceptible to circulating poisons and chemicals. The activated charcoal adsorbs these chemicals (not ABsorb, but ADsorb, which is different), removing them from the water and keeping the fish alive.
Similarly, activated charcoal can be used to build your own makeshift water filtration system using a 5-gallon bucket, a few pounds of pebbles and some clean sand. First, drill a hole in the bottom of a bucket / pail, then fill the bucket’s bottom section with several inches of small pebbles. Then place a fine screen (made from a polymer material is best) on top of the rocks. This is to prevent the charcoal from running out between the pebbles. Now pack in several inches of activated charcoal powder on top of the screen. Top that off with at least six inches of clean sand and cover it with a cloth. Pour the water directly onto the cloth and it will filter down through the sand, the charcoal and the pebbles. You’ve got a makeshift gravity water filter! (It’s not as effective as off-the-shelf filters such as Big Berkey, but you can make it yourself in a pinch.)
By the way, I’ve actually lab tested the ability of water filters to remove heavy metals. See my findings at www.WaterFilterLabs.com
Emergency Medicine Item #3: Veterinary Blood Stop Powder or Yunnan Baiyao
Veterinary supplies are a fantastic source for emergency medicine, and one of the medicines few people know about is called “hemostatic powdered medicine.” It stops bleeding FAST.
From the world of conventional veterinary medicine, the product you want is called “Blood Stop Powder.” It’s made from a combination of iron sulfate, ammonia, aluminum and tannic acid. When it meets blood, it rapidly forms a solid mass (an instant scab). Farmers and ranchers use this all the time to stop severe bleeding from animals such as when cows experience a difficult birth and tear part of the birth canal in the process.
The product label carries a warning that it’s “Not for use on humans,” but in a life-or-death emergency, I doubt you’ll care what the label says. The product works just fine on any mammal with blood, and unless you’ve already been turned into a zombie, that probably includes you.
A nearly identical product has existed for literally thousands of years in the world of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It’s called “Yunnan Baiyao,” and it also stops bleeding almost instantly. The ingredients remain a family secret, but it is believed to be made primarily from natural TCM herbs and plants.
Both of these products are available off-the-shelf right now, without a prescription. Search for “Yunnan Baiyao” on Amazon.com and you’ll see that you can even buy this online. Both of these hemostatic powders may become invaluable in a collapse scenario when medical supplies are very difficult to come by, so I encourage everyone to consider adding this to their medicine chest right now while there’s still time.
Emergency Medicine Item #4: Essential Oil Wipes
There’s a fascinating new product from a company called DefenseSoap.com that uses the power of natural essential oils to combat almost every pathogen you might imagine (on surfaces, not for internal use).
The product is called “Defense Body Wipes” and they currently cater to professional fighters, wrestlers and athletes who want to sanitize surfaces so they don’t subject their bodies to all the strange viruses, bacteria and fungi that contaminate gymnasiums.
But what’s really cool about this product is that it is made with just two powerful essential oils: Tea Tree Oil and Eucalyptus Oil, both of which offer astonishing properties on their own.
Essential oils are Mother Nature’s medicine, and there’s healing power in a vast array of such oils. One of my favorites is oregano oil, an almost instant cure for food poisoning. (My first aid kit includes a lot of oregano oil extract, and I won’t travel without it.)
Eucalyptus Oil, Tea Tree Oil and even Thyme Oil are natural antibacterials, and although the FDA won’t let manufacturers tell you this, they also kill fungi, superbugs and are very likely effective at killing Ebola on contaminated surfaces. (Bleach also does the trick for Ebola on surfaces.)
If you have these oils, you can make your own wipes, or you can simply purchase pre-made products like Defense Body Wipes which deliver the benefits of these oils in a convenient package with the added benefit of NO artificial fragrance chemicals.
Emergency Medicine Item #5: Live Aloe Vera
I grow aloe vera as a source of food and medicine. You can eat the gel (not the skin or the brownish sap, but the clear gel only) or blend it into smoothies.
The gel is much like Manuka honey in its antibacterial and wound healing properties. It can be rubbed directly onto burns or wounds to function as a self-sealing natural bandage that also kills bacteria and traps aerosolized particles that may carry pathogens.
In an emergency, aloe vera can even be packed into flesh wounds as a temporary fix until the victim can reach medical personnel for acute treatment. A flesh gunshot wound — but not a deep internal gunshot wound — could be temporarily dealt with quite effectively with some Blood Stop Powder, followed by aloe vera gel or Manuka honey, then bandaged until the person can be transported to a doctor or surgeon. Obviously, a tourniquet should be used if needed. Blood Stop Powder alone won’t seal off a gusher.
By the way, a well-known “Monk’s cure” for cancer, developed by Brazilian monk Romano Zago, is made with just three ingredients: Whole aloe vera leaf, honey, and alcohol (it’s only about 1% alcohol), all blended together into a nasty-tasting liquid. This formula is described at the Budwig Center web page: http://www.budwigcenter.com/aloe-arborescens…
It is claimed that this formula cures over 100 illnesses and halts tumor growth, although I personally couldn’t back up this claim without knowing a lot more about it. What I can tell you is that is tastes awful, because I made some myself just to try it. The important thing is that you can make this yourself, if you dare, from aloe, honey and alcohol. All three ingredients should be part of your emergency first aid medicine chest anyway.
Aloe vera leaves are self-sealing when cut from the plant, and they can be carried as a form of portable emergency first aid. Aloe is incredibly easy to grow and will self-reproduce by growing baby aloe plants around the established larger plant. Dig up these baby aloe plants and transplant them into soils with good drainage to multiply your aloe garden.
Like nearly all succulents, aloe is incredibly drought resistant and can be effectively grown in containers that you bring indoors for the winter. The following photo is from my own aloe garden in Texas:
Pharma medicine will disappear quickly in a collapse
One of the principles I’ve learned as a holistic medicine and plant science researcher (http://labs.naturalnews.com) is that there’s far more medicine around you than you might think. In fact, if you take a walk in nature, almost everything is a form of medicine: tree bark, soil microbes, plant leaves, sunshine, rock minerals, water, and so on.
Everything except Obamacare, anyway.
Only a fool believes that medicine comes exclusively from pharmacies, drug companies and doctors. The vast majority of the world’s population doesn’t use western pharmaceutical medicine. Instead, they rely on plant-based medicines to achieve far superior states of health (without the health care costs of the un-Affordable Care Act).
Yes, western medicine has an important role to play in all this, and my own survival preps include pharmaceutical antibiotics and chemical sterilizing agents. Anesthesia medicines and topical painkillers are also real lifesavers in a crisis. But anyone who believes that honey and aloe vera isn’t also a form of medicine is flatly uninformed (or brainwashed by pharma propaganda).
In a collapse crisis, one of the first things that will disappear is prescription medicines. Pharmacies will be among the first targets to be looted, as you already know. Pharma medicines would then only be available on the black market at sky-high prices. You don’t want to land yourself in a situation where you have to trade ammo for antiseptics… especially when you can grow aloe vera for free and produce your own antiseptics using soil, sunshine and rainwater.
Finally, remember that in a SHTF scenario, people will die from lack of knowledge about natural medicines. Some will die from infections, desperately waiting for prescription antibiotics even when plant-based medicines are readily available in their own back yards (literally, in the form of medicinal weeds). Others will die from injuries that got infected because they didn’t know to treat those wounds with Manuka honey, aloe vera or colloidal silver.
People who bet their lives on the western medical complex may very well lose that bet when things hit the fan. Make sure you don’t become one of those people by stocking up on natural medicines and learning how to grow your own. That knowledge can literally mean the difference between living and dying.