We'll be adding to these as we find more. All of these have worked for me or for my friends in Rose Creek Village. They are in alphabetical order.
Legal disclaimer: I am not a doctor! I don't treat or cure diseases. If you have any sort of dangerous or severe problem, you should see a health professional. I'm just a guy letting you know what's worked for me and others. What works for one person may not work for another. I am as sure as an average joe can be that everything below is safe, and most of it is obviously safe (like garlic, for example). I check things out at the National Institute of Health web site before I go recommending them. For example, some things—like ephedra, which was popular as an herb at one time—are known to be dangerous. You ought to do the same.
First, let me say that not all brown recluses are the same. From what I can tell in research on the internet, the hobo spider of Oregon, a cousin to the brown recluse, is vastly more dangerous than even the yellowish Missouri recluses. Here in Tennessee, our recluses look less yellow than the Missouri ones. So, it's entirely possible that the reason the following remedy works is because the Tennessee recluse is not as venomous.
I have been bitten by a recluse four times now. It's bite is very distinctive. There is a red area that swells up. It expands outward as it swells, not upward. The center, where the bite itself is, begins to decay. The skin turns almost black, in small, soggy pieces, and comes right off, leaving an open wound behind. For me, it takes a day or two for the central wound to get to the size of a dime, while the swollen red area can easily extend two inches in every direction around it. Once it gets going, it seems like it will never stop, but I've always treated it within a couple days.
I treat it with Nature's Sunshine's Black Ointment. It works awesome. The one time that I couldn't get to the Black Ointment quickly, it had been two full days since the bite, and I had the dime sized wound, with a ring of blackened skin around it, plus the angry red swelling. It didn't hurt much, but it itched pretty bad. When I got to the black ointment it took about 24 hours for the peeling of skin and the swelling to stop spreading, but then it all healed up in three or four days. I rubbed the ointment over the whole swollen area and covered it with a patch, and I did it two to three times daily.
My daughter was bit by a recluse when she was just a year or two old. We actually saw that recluse crawling away; we didn't just recognize the bite. We got Black Ointment on the bite within minutes of her being bitten. It was night time, and the recluse had been in our bed. (Forget all that stuff about recluses being in attics and other remote places; they crawl across our living rooms here in Tennessee.) A lot of her hand swelled up overnight, but the next day it all started receding. She never did develop the peeling, black skin.
By the way, we had a registered nurse look at the bite on my daughter's hand that night. Many people who recommend herbal remedies like these avoid doctors. I do not. While I don't think doctors do much to tell you how to stay healthy, they are rather amazing at restoring you to health when you have accidents, diseases, or some other problem. Make use of them when you need them!
A bunion is an enlargement of the base knuckle on the big toe. Calcium builds up in the joint and causes the big toe to turn towards the other toes. In severe cases, the toe can be almost completely sideways. There can be pain in the joint from the deformity, and there can also be pain due to pressure by shoes on the enlarged knuckle.
I have a mild to moderate bunion on my right foot, and it used to regularly hurt through the evening, aching like a mild sprain, especially if I jogged. I found an MSM-Glucosamine cream put out by Nature's Sunshine and began using it. After a couple weeks my bunion stopped aching. I stopped using the cream for a while to see if it was really the cause. In fact, over the next three or four years, I stopped using the cream three or four times, because it seemed hard to believe it was working so well. The pain always came back. At somewhere around the five year mark, my bunion stopped hurting even when I didn't use the cream. I haven't used it in at least a year, and I never have bunion pain, even though it had bothered me for many years prior to using the cream. You can get a tube at this web site. I can't vouch for that site, as I order my cream here at the village, but the price is good.
Change the way you eat! It's seems utterly insane to me to exist on medication for the rest of your life when you can simply stop eating like a rich person! Eat less shellfish and less red meat. Make sure you get enough water. Cut down on the coffee; you don't have to give it up. That works for almost everybody.
If it doesn't work for you, then you should also try tart cherry juice. I've only had two gout attacks, so I think my body's pretty flexible. If I don't go overboard on the beef, it's not an issue. However, there's plenty of claim that the tart cherry juice helps even those much more prone to gout than I am. There is a study currently being performed to test tart cherry juice on gout. One study in mice has already shown favorable results.
On the other hand, despite what the cherry juice sellers say, it's very difficult to find a way to take it palatably. I finally settled on two tablespoons of extract in a 12 oz. glass, unsweetened, every other day. I just swigged it as fast as I could. I tried various other methods, and tart cherry juice simply tastes awful, no matter what you do to it. That's how it was for me, anyway. Also, if I had a glass every day, it have me diarrhea, so I had to limit it.
I've had sore throats every year pretty much all my life. When I was a child the military doctors kept suggesting taking out my tonsils, but they never did. I was on penicillin or some other -cillin once or twice every year for the first 40 years of my life.
Then someone told me that garlic was a natural antibiotic. So I tried treating my tonsillitis/strep with three or four cloves of garlic a day. It didn't work. My sore throat got worse, then spread to my ear with a painful infection. I went and got amoxycillin.
I tried it on my four-year-old daughter, though, and it worked great. As I was doing that, I had a sudden flash, becoming suddenly gifted with the ability to recognize the obvious, and I realized that if it took 3 cloves for my 40-pound daughter, it would take a lot more for me. So the next time I got tonsillitis, I took 10 to 12 cloves a day for three days.
Awesome results. Complete recovery. Now, mind you, by the time I had slept in my bedroom all night no one could walk in the room without choking on the smell. No wonder they say it keeps vampires away. Of course, it was only three days, and the smell disappeared in a day or two. However, depending on your living situation and job, you may not be able to use such massive doses of garlic as an option.
Some people use odorless garlic pills for the same purpose. One, they're not as odorless as they claim to be, though they're way better than fresh garlic, and two, they've never done me a lick of good no matter how many I've taken. I have friends--and a wife--who claim they work, though.