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How To

A cure for cold sores

I can’t take credit for this cure. A life-long nurse told me about it a few years ago, and it’s worked for us ever since. I’m not sure if she’d be comfortable having her name revealed here, so I won’t do it. But I’ll always be grateful to her for the advice.

In a few words, cold sores are cured and even prevented by Lysine. Any brand should do. Just go to your local supermarket or drug store and pick up some Lysine pills. They’re white, round, medium-sized as pills go, and they’ll do a number on your cold sore.

I, for example, have had these things since my childhood. Whenever I got stressed, or ate too much sugared stuff, or happened to be recovering from a cold or some other illness and my immune system was down, I got a cold sore. I used to be terribly embarrassed about them, and I still am, to some degree. Sometimes I’d get them four or five times a year, and each one took about 2-3 weeks to go away completely.

Now, whenever I feel that tingle in my skin and know that one’s on the way, I take a Lysine pill. You can take up to 3-4 pills a day, just don’t take them all at once. It’s not a sure-fire, 100% kind of thing, but I would say the overwhelming majority of the time, the cold sore doesn’t even show up on the skin. It just goes away. And when it does manage to break out, taking Lysine while you have it will make it go away sooner.

I don’t know why other cures don’t work, particularly the useless brand-name cremes that cost upwards of $20 for a tiny little tube (they only make things worse for me) — but inexpensive Lysine does the job just great. For less than $10, you get a huge pill bottle that will likely last you more years than you’ll remember.

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Condensed knowledge for 2007-09-19

A bit of a health theme to this edition of condensed knowledge:

  • A new CPR technique was discovered. It’s called OAC-CPR (Only rhythmic Abdominal Compression). As its name implies, you only press on the abdomen, eliminating the risk of broken ribs, mouth-to-mouth, and fatigue from pushing so hard. Definitely worth looking into this!
  • Prozac found in the drinking water in the UK. Apparently so many people are on the anti-depressant in England, that it can now be found, diluted, in the water supply, after having passed through their bodies, into the sewers, through the water treatment plants, etc. Although the “experts” are saying there’s no risk, I doubt it. I mean, this is a drug, found active, in the water supply!
  • WD40 turns out to be a great help for bad joints. Despite the precautions written on the cans, rubbing it into the skin was of tremendous help to a man suffering from joint pain. Not sure that I’d recommend this.
  • Aspartame is the behind the spike in suicides for teen and pre-teen girls. Apparently, it’s a powerful mood-changer — it causes depression. Something to think about the next time you buy your children something with Nutrasweet or Aspartame as the sweetener.
  • Exercising in traffic is bad for your heart. Now that’s something I’ve known was wrong for some time. It just didn’t make sense to me when I saw people running on the sidewalk, next to heavy traffic, breathing in all those noxious fumes. When I run, I want to breathe fresh, healthy air, not someone’s nasty car exhaust. I just couldn’t get why they’d put themselves through something that unhealthy. It turns out the particulates from vehicle emissions decrease our blood’s ability to clot, and restrict the amount of blood that reaches the heart immediately upon exposure.
  • Mobile phones are as dangerous as smoking. So reads a recent headline… People have gone back and forth on the safety of mobile phones for years. Now the EU has finally decided to pick a side and take action. The article’s in Romanian, but what it says is that governments are starting to take mitigating action, first by warning people of the risks, and then by looking at ways to minimize exposure to WiFi radiation. They’re recommending that people go back to using wired Internet connections instead of wireless ones.

Now for some funny stuff:

And some economic discussion:

  • Greenspan on Iraq war, oil link. He confirms what I’ve thought and said for some time. In his talk with Matt Lauer, he touches on the housing bubble and the fiscal irresponsibility of the current administration, but he has no compliments for the Democrats, either. Last, but no least, he says the dollar may be replaced by the euro as the reserve currency of choice.
  • Transparent Investing: what your broker doesn’t want you to know. Here’s a site that offers a purportedly frank discussion of index investing. Definitely worth a look.
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Condensed knowledge for 2007-06-01

Here are the weekend-ready goodies:

  • MS releases the Surface touchscreen computer. Previously code-named Milan, this puppy is manipulated using our hands — no mouse, no keyboard. You might say, whoopee, these displays have been around for years. True, but this is the first time they’re coming to the mass market, and what sets this device apart is that it interacts automatically with other wireless devices. If you put your wireless camera on the Surface, it’ll know to download all of the photos from the camera, wirelessly. If you put your cellphone on it, and it’s got a wireless connection, you can then drag that same photo to your cellphone. Same thing with videos. The built-in, automatic interaction is really, really cool.
  • Have you heard about the MINI Cooper D? It’s a sweet little car! (I have the Cooper S myself, but I’m already drooling for the D). The revised model will get up to 72.4 mpg! Wow!
  • Xerox has developed paper that you can re-use up to 50 times. You can print on it using UV rays, but the characters will start to fade after 24 hours, and when they’re completely faded, you can use it again. Now that’s what I call recycling!
  • A completely innocent American was arrested, handcuffed to a pillar, his feet were chained, and he was interrogated by the Secret Service, all for trying to pay with legal, new $2 bills. The man went to Best Buy to pay an outstanding balance for a stereo installation on his son’s car (after the store promised him it would be free, but charged him regardless), and when he decided to pay it with $2 bills, the clerk called the police, who then took him into custody and interrogated him. What’s more, he was handcuffed inside the store, in full view of everyone! Here’s my take on this… First, I don’t like Best Buy, because their prices are always higher than Circuit City and CompUSA. Second, their employees are rude and haven’t got a clue about the technology they sell. Third, that pathetic cashier owes the man a huge apology. Fourth, that cop who hancuffed and arrested the man shouldn’t be on the force. His powers of judgment are obviously subpar and he has no common sense. And fifth, the excuse of the police spokesman, Bill Toohey, is absolutely inadequate: “It’s a sign that we’re a little nervous in a post 9/11 world.” Just what does a $2 bill have to do with 9/11? That was their apology to the man? That’s it?!
  • The Rattlebuster is a really cool CD that plays vibration-inducing sounds at certain frequencies, helping you pinpoint the annoying rattles and vibrations in your car’s interior. As a MINI owner who’s had a persistent rattle in his dashboard for the past four years, a rattle that countless trips to the dealership couldn’t resolve, I can safely say that every MINI dealership ought to make this product a standard part of their diagnostic procedures.
  • Richard Marcus wrote a really nice piece for BlogCritics detailing what happens to the water in our environment when all of the medications that we take pass from our bodies into the sewers, then into lakes and rivers. The effects of the metabolized drugs on wildlife are shocking, and do not bode well for us, either.
  • Want to know the top ten passwords people use? Have a look at this, and try not to use one of them yourself, eh?
  • It pays to know your photographer’s rights!
  • Steve Jobs and Bill Gates met on the same stage and talked publicly for the first time in decades. What’s more, they complimented each other! 🙂
  • This is why I think public education is getting to be rotten to the core. The public school system endorses events like the one where Joel Becker (irresponsible dolt extraordinaire) from UCLA speak their dirty minds. This dude actually advised kids as young as 12 years old to have sex, do drugs and masturbate… Kids were forced to attend this event by their school, and it was only months after the fact, when pressed repeatedly by parents for an explanation and apology, that they admitted the subject matter was inappropriate. I have to wonder, where is our responsibility as adults to educate our children properly? How can we let the school system continue to chip away at the values we try to instill in our kids? How screwed up is this world when a person as irresponsible as Joel Becker is not only allowed to hold a professorship at UCLA, but also allowed to expound on the virtues of sex and drugs to young, impressionable children?
  • Hey, look, Screaming Beans! 🙂
  • A new spoofing/phishing technique has been spotted in the wild, where some sort of DLL attaches itself to IE, and when people surf legitimate URLs (like their bank website or PayPal), they get asked for unusual extra, private information. This thing isn’t yet detectable by anti-virus/anti-spyware programs, so be sure to follow this story as it develops. And if you get asked some strange questions the next time you visit your bank’s site, don’t answer them, call the bank to verify why they need that information.
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Condensed knowledge for 2007-05-08

Here’s the good stuff:

  • XKCD put together a hilarious map of the online communities. 🙂
  • Steve Jobs published an open letter to Apple users outlining the progress Apple is making toward being a completely “green” company. From the looks of it, Apple is ahead of most other folks in the technology field. Then again, it could also seem this way because of his reality distortion field.
  • A man traveling on a plane from Vietnam to Australia vomited a small bag containing something that looked like drugs. The plane promptly turned back, and meanwhile, the man vomited up two more bags. Apparently, this is quite common, and these people are called “drug mules”. Doctors found 30 more bags containing drugs in his stomach.
  • A flavoring agent used in microwave popcorn, by the name diacetyl, is blamed for bronchiolitis obliterans, an obstructive lung disease that affects popcorn workers. It’s also called “popcorn workers’ lung”, and there is no cure. A transplant is the only solution. Something to think about the next time you eat popcorn…
  • Want to see living conditions for coal miners back in 1938?
  • A remote-controlled robot uses thermal imaging to locate and destroy termites.
  • ProBlogger’s put together a post called “9 attitudes of highly creative people“.
  • Packet Garden is a really cool application that constructs 3D maps of your internet traffic.
  • Mental Floss is running a feature called “8 smooches that shook the world“.
  • Who holds the record for being arrested the most times? It turns out to be a man named Henry Earl.
  • Back in 1946, Mike the Headless Chicken roamed the countryside. Looks like Mike was going to be dinner, but the farmer cut too high, and left just enough brain stem for the chicken to still be a chicken. Although it couldn’t feed, it could walk and “socialize” with the other chickens just fine, and even managed to earn the farmer the equivalent of current-day $50K/week.
  • A Japanese firm has developed special packaging that contains an exothermic agent. Pre-cooked rice placed inside can be warmed up simply by pouring cold water inside the packaging. The reaction with the agent creates steam that warms the rice and gets it ready to eat in about 15 minutes.
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Thoughts

Popping pills

Given our obsession with popping pills for just about every condition, symptom and imagined thing, I think it’s worthwhile to have a look at this next video:

There’s also a funnier take on this.

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