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How to Stay Out of the Emergency Department

The medical establishment often seems to have the goal of keeping you dependent and afraid. However, if you empower yourself with knowledge, you can develop the confidence to handle many injuries and acute medical conditions on your own and avoid heading to the emergency department. It is possible to deal with a wide range of emergency situations at home using natural mate­rials and methods.

There are at least six types of situations that you can learn to address on your own: bites and stings (including those involving venom); bleed­ing emergencies; cuts, lacerations and other wounds; accidental poison­ing (whether from industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals or poisonous mushrooms and plants); gastrointestinal distress, such as severe vomit­ing, diarrhea and dehydration; and high fevers, including febrile seizures. Many of these are situations that might affect children, so it is helpful for parents to learn how to handle them.

Of course, there will still be situations when you should consider going to the hospital. In that case, how do you prepare in advance? And once you arrive, how do you assert your rights and make sure that you’re not railroaded and steered toward interventions that you don’t want? It’s important to learn how to advocate for yourself and protect your self-sovereignty.

BITES AND STINGS

There are many types of bites and stings— from insects (spiders, ticks and stinging insects like bees, wasps and hornets), sea creatures (such as jellyfish, Portuguese man-of-war and venomous sea snails) and snakes, as well as bites from animals and even humans. Regardless of the type of bite or sting, there will be con­tamination in the wound of some kind—whether venom or just whatever kind of toxic substances may be in that organism’s mouth parts. For example, ticks are known to harbor arsenic because they’re unaffected by it and can store it up.¹ When they bite you, they may inject some of that arsenic into your blood, which could cause toxicity to you. With human bites, there can be toxic substances in a person’s saliva, especially if they are very unhealthy.

Stock bentonite clay powder at home, and if you are going on an outing or vacation in the woods or at the beach, take a small amount (a few tablespoons) in a little satchel in your pocket, purse or knapsack. If you apply benton­ite clay within a very short time period—almost immediately after a bite or sting—you generally can reverse any potential problems, even if you get bit by a rabid animal. The clay has amazing adsorbent properties that will essentially suck whatever contaminating substance is there right out of the wound and into the clay.² In general, you want to apply the clay powder (either dry or mixed into a thick paste with a small amount of water) directly on the bite or sting. If the wound is more of a puncture, you will want to press it in there as much as possible. Leave it on for a minute and then rinse it off with water and ap­ply more, until you are fairly certain that you have removed all of the contamination. This even works if you get sprayed by a skunk; first, treat it locally as just described, and then take a bath with the clay—it will get rid of all of the smell—unlike other remedies you might read about on the Internet!

If for some reason this approach is unsuc­cessful (for example, you forget to bring your satchel of clay and there’s a time delay, or if the wound is so deep and contaminated such that you can’t get the clay on there fast enough or apply enough of it to penetrate), what you will probably notice is some redness or other discoloration developing around the wound, or burning or stinging or itching that tells you that the toxin has spread beyond the wound margins. In that situation, you can help your body process and detoxify the contaminant by placing a healing solvent on the skin.

There are several options as far as topical healing solvents go. One of them, found in many homes, is castor oil; castor oil packs can be very useful. A second option, turpentine, is my personal go-to healing solvent. Apply a few drops around and over the area of the skin where the symptoms are and gently rub them in with your fingertip. Most of the turpentine will penetrate the skin, and some will evaporate. A third excellent option is DMSO (dimethyl­sulfoxide),³ which is easily absorbed by the skin. You can either blend it with castor oil or turpentine—both will penetrate the skin very well when mixed with DMSO—or use DMSO by itself, diluted to a 50 percent solution with distilled water. Any of those will help dissolve the toxin through the skin and take it to the liver for elimination. You might also follow up with an enema⁴ or some other way to stimulate a bowel movement.

What if you are very unfortunate and the reaction has spread beyond the local area, caus­ing generalized symptoms? This might be a situation involving a serious bite or sting from, for example, an extremely venomous snake or scorpion. At this point, you might decide to go to the hospital, or, depending on the severity of the situation, you could consider systemic therapy—doing enemas or stimulating a strong bowel evacuation (for example, by taking one teaspoon of turpentine with a quarter to half a cup of castor oil to get whatever is dissolved by the turpentine completely out of your body). Something like chlorine dioxide could also be useful. However, if you always have bentonite clay at hand and are able to use it right away, you are likely to avoid this scenario and probably will have an easy time of things.

People have asked me whether it is possible to manage an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting without resorting to an EpiPen. It is defi­nitely possible, and I would note that EpiPens are not magic bullets, in any case. As a doctor, I observed a case of full-blown anaphylaxis in a woman whose pathologist was administering plasma exchange; she had an anaphylactic reac­tion to the pooled plasma, and her blood pressure dropped to almost nothing. It turned out that all she needed was fluid resuscitation; after she received a liter and a half of fluids, her pressure came back up, and she was fine. We didn’t need to give her epinephrine at all. If it is truly ana­phylaxis, getting fluids in is probably the most important thing to do. This can be achieved by drinking copious amounts of water or via enema if the individual is unconscious.

SITUATIONS INVOLVING BLEEDING

Many people are uncomfortable at the sight of blood, so situations involving bleeding (beyond ordinary cuts and scrapes) can seem scary. One of the most important things is staying calm. An adult has about a gallon and a half of blood, and they can lose at least half of that—three-quarters of a gallon—before there is even any risk of them going into shock. So, if you see a lot of blood, don’t panic, because there is a lot more in there!

The essential thing to ascertain right away is whether there is arterial bleeding. This is not very difficult to figure out, because the blood will be pulsing or spurting out with each heart­beat. I have only ever seen one person have an arterial bleed, and it was a very old person who was fragile and had skin atrophy. Other situa­tions where you might be at risk of an arterial bleed involve serious injuries where a part of your body is severed or there is a stab or other violent wound.

If you determine that it is arterial bleeding, it’s very important to get control of the bleeding as soon as possible and then seek further atten­tion from a surgeon. With a severed artery, you will need to cut off blood flow to prevent further blood loss. If it’s in an extremity (a hand, finger, arm, leg, foot or toe), you can apply a tourniquet. If the bleeding artery is not on an extremity, you will need to pack the wound with zeolite and apply a pressure bandage as described below. You will need to apply manual pressure as well to ensure that the bleeding is slowed or stopped until you can get surgical treatment. Alterna­tively, you can try applying direct pressure with a finger or hand, but that will be difficult unless the artery is very small; you will have to remain vigilant and keep up the pressure until you can get additional help—this is not something you can just wrap and leave alone.

For an arterial bleed on an extremity, always apply a tourniquet as soon as possible. Many kinds of tourniquets are available at outdoor supply and military surplus stores. Emergency tourniquets are small; soldiers carry them in their medical kit. In a pinch, there are also ways to make an improvised tourniquet pretty eas­ily—the important thing is to learn in advance how to do it. The tourniquet must be closer to the heart than the bleeding artery. After you tie it off, seek medical attention from a surgeon, who will be able to suture up the artery and then take the tourniquet off. If you can’t get to a hospital, you will save the person’s life by leaving the tourniquet on and preventing them from bleed­ing to death, but anything further away from that tourniquet may have to be amputated later. Fortunately, these are rare situations.

In most cases, you will encounter venous (or perhaps capillary) bleeding rather than arterial bleeding. Even in serious situations, you can control this type of bleeding yourself; you don’t need a surgeon or tourniquet except for rare situations, such as severe injuries or bleeding disorders. Again, the first step is always to as­sess the type of bleeding and where the bleeding is coming from. It’s not often that even a gunshot wound will hit an artery (and if it hits an artery inside the abdomen or chest, most likely the person won’t survive), so if the person is alive and they’re bleeding, most likely it is this other type of bleeding, which you can control.

You should have wound packing materi­als on hand—plain gauze and some kind of elastic pressure bandage. You can use any kind of elastic bandage, or you can get special elastic adhesive tape for pressure dressings, available at online outlets or medical supply stores. Basically, you want to press the packing material down with your hand, arm or body to get control of the bleeding; once you feel the bleeding stop, put the pressure bandage on to keep it from bleeding more. At that point, you might consider going to the hospital, or you can manage the wound at home using some of the protocols that I describe below.

If you are unable to stop the bleeding with direct pressure, and if the wound is deep (for example, a deep gunshot wound), something you can use from the get-go is clinoptilolite zeolite,⁵ a mineral. Zeolite is very good at stop­ping bleeding (hemostasis), and it’s very safe; in fact, if there are any toxic contaminants in the wound, it will absorb them. To use zeolite for this purpose, put a liberal amount of the powder right down deep in the wound; then put the packing material on top and apply pressure on top of that. If it’s a superficial cut (like a kitchen knife cut) in the fingers, that area has a rich blood supply, and it can be difficult to stop the bleeding with pressure. Instead, put the zeolite right on the cut and press, or put some in a bowl and press your finger to the powder in the bowl. Applying zeolite powder and pressure should stop the bleeding quickly, and then you can manage the wound.

WOUND MANAGEMENT

You can do quite a bit at home related to managing a wound, even if you think it needs sutures. After you have gotten control of the bleeding, you need to clean and irrigate the wound. (If there is only a little bleeding, you can clean it first and then put pressure on it afterwards to get the bleeding to completely stop.) By cleaning, I mean flushing the wound copiously with water. Purified water (such as distilled or reverse osmosis) is preferable, but if only tap water is available, it will still work and shouldn’t cause much harm.

After you clean the wound, assess it more carefully. The first thing to assess is whether you did a good job cleaning it. Make sure there is no debris, dirt or contamination visible to the naked eye. If there is, take steps to remove it; if you have to pull pieces out, then re-irrigate the wound afterwards. Don’t worry about using a large quantity of water—just make sure the wound is fully clean and washed out.

Part of your assessment will also be to evaluate whether the wound is superficial or deep. If it is deeper (for example, if it goes be­low the fat that is right under the skin) or if it is on a vulnerable area of the body where there is not a lot of tissue (such as the hands or feet), then you will want to look even more carefully. You might need to squirt some water to clear away the blood and see more clearly. Make sure nothing is cut beneath the skin, like a tendon or muscle, and that no organs are exposed. If everything looks fine, then don’t worry about it; even if something underneath is cut, it still may be able to heal on its own.

The next thing to assess is function. Let’s say it looks like the muscles in your calf are cut. Pick up your foot and try to move it around in all directions to see whether you can move it ef­fectively. Even if there is pain, if you can move it functionally, then you don’t necessarily need to have a surgeon look at it. On the other hand, if there is significant damage—for example, if a muscle is cut fully through or an organ is nicked, bleeding or damaged—then you might want to seek expert assistance.

The next step is to approximate the wound margin and possibly to put a dressing on it. There is also a decision to be made: Does the wound need to be closed in some way? You might be surprised to learn that if you don’t close a wound (sometimes referred to as “secondary intention wound healing”), you can actually have quite good cosmetic results—sometimes even better than stitches—depending on the wound and how you care for it. Don’t feel like you absolutely need stitches in every situation.

If the wound margins are close together, so that you can push them together fairly eas­ily, you can use adhesive wound closure strips (“Steri-Strips”). You can put these strong little strips of tape across the wound on both sides. If you put a row (just like you might have a row of stitches), they will keep the wound margins closed and allow the wound to heal.

Where there is some destruction of the skin or the cut is so big that you can’t easily pull the two sides together, you might think stitches are the best way to go. You can learn how to do stitches yourself, and actually, it’s not hard. Lots of farmers stitch their animals and even family members. There are many videos that can help you learn, and you can buy suture materials intended for veterinary use without any kind of license. It’s up to you if you would like to learn that skill. Although I specialized in psychiatry, I invested time in practicing this skill; I was one of the only psychiatrists who was suturing up people at the psych hospital.

You can also heal well without stitches, even if the wound margins are far apart, with the help of an aloe dressing. The slimy gel ma­trix of the aloe plant, which is largely made of structured water, provides a great healing matrix for wounds—it gives good results, especially compared to the man-made dressings that doc­tors use. I have a bunch of aloe plants at home so that I can cut fresh leaves off a living plant and give gratitude to that plant if this situation comes up. Cut off the appropriate-length leaf and slice it open lengthwise with a knife; then fold it open and put the slimy side down right on the wound. If the wound is really big, you may need to use more than one leaf, or cut a thicker leaf in sec­tions and place the sections side by side. After you get the aloe on the wound (which is often soothing), wrap it with a thin layer of gauze. I then recommend putting a couple of pads around it because some of the gel will leak around the margins; the gauze pads will help soak it up. I like to use a self-adhesive wrap on top of that. You can also use tape, but self-adhesive wrap is convenient because it stretches and sticks to itself (no need for metal pins of the type used with ACE bandages). After you wrap it, that dressing will be good for at least twenty-four hours before you need to change it, and after you change it at twenty-four hours, it might be good for up to two days. When the surface looks intact—either it has scabbed over or there is no exposed tissue deep to the skin—you can discontinue the dressings.

If you develop any signs of what might be referred to as a wound infection, such as red­ness, heat, tenderness or discomfort, you can remove the dressing and place some drops of turpentine (pure gum spirits of turpentine) right over the skin that is red and inflamed (i.e., right around the wound). Do that three to four times a day, and that should resolve it. In that scenario, you will have to remove and change the dressing each time, until the symptoms resolve.

People are concerned about tetanus with open wounds, but I have never seen or even heard of an actual case of tetanus; nor have any of the infectious disease doctors that I have asked. It’s the same story with rabies, by the way. It is helpful to know that these conditions are, at most, quite rare, because a lot of parents, in particular, are very scared of them.

ACCIDENTAL POISONING

The first thing to know when dealing with poisoning situations is that some poisons have unique or specific antidotes. For example, the antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning is pure oxygen (or as close to it as you can get); this type of poisoning is recognizable because the person will turn cherry red in certain parts of their body. (Oxygen may be administered at home, but only if you already have a tank or oxygen concentrator. Every ambulance has those and can provide treatment on the spot.)

Milk thistle⁶ or NAC (N-acetylcysteine)⁷ are the specific antidotes for acetaminophen (Tyle­nol) overdose or ingestion of certain poisonous mushrooms that can cause liver failure.

Sometimes a poison is an antidote for an­other poison that is even more poisonous. For example, if you accidentally ingest methanol (wood alcohol), which is a neurotoxin and can cause blindness, seizures, other neurologic prob­lems and even death, you can displace it with regular alcohol (ethanol, like the kind of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages). However, there would need to be a calculation of how much alcohol you would have to drink, depending on how much methanol was ingested. With seri­ous poisonings, it is not a bad idea to call your poison control center and find out if there is a specific antidote for whatever poison you are dealing with. Perhaps you have the antidote on hand, or you can go to a medical facility, which usually has antidotes for the most common types of poisoning.

With that said, three remedies can cover almost every type of accidental poisoning that you might encounter in your day-to-day life, including some life-threatening situations. First, for anything that you are exposed to by mouth, activated charcoal—which has adsorbent prop­erties similar to bentonite clay—can suck it up.⁸ Emergency departments use this, too, but they often deliver it by putting a tube down your nose into your stomach. Instead of this unpleasant experience, just drink it in a glass of water—a full tablespoon of the charcoal in a tall glass of water—and take it as soon as possible. You can repeat that dose every thirty to sixty minutes for no more than about ten doses—but you probably will not need that many, because if the activated charcoal is going to be effective, the symptoms should resolve after a few doses.

Vitamin C is a second compound that has powerful properties in poisoning situations.⁹ In one study, researchers gave laboratory animals fatal doses of formaldehyde (embalming fluid), which is very poisonous. Then, some of the animals were given a moderate (not super high) dose of vitamin C, while the others received no vitamin C. In the group that got no vitamin C, 100 percent died, whereas none died in the group that got vitamin C, and most didn’t even have any symptoms. I suggest taking vitamin C to bowel tolerance (that is, until you develop diarrhea) if taken by mouth. If you are tak­ing ascorbic acid (the vitamin C supplement you normally would get from a chemical or pharmaceutical company), I suggest taking one thousand milligrams every thirty minutes until you get diarrhea. Sources of “vitamin C” obtained from nature consist of more than one compound and are more potent. Acerola cherries are one of the fruits with the highest content of these compounds. If you take acerola cherry powder, I recommend two teaspoons in a tall glass of water every thirty minutes until you get diarrhea.

The third poisoning antidote is milk thistle, which is an amazing way to boost your liver’s detox function into overdrive. Milk thistle can also save you from substances that are highly toxic to the liver. Right after the poisoning, take one teaspoon (or three capsules) of ground-up milk thistle seeds four times, about every four hours, until you have taken four doses. If poison­ing symptoms remain the next day, take another four doses of milk thistle spread throughout the day. You can use NAC instead, which is very similar to milk thistle, or you can combine them. If you use NAC for this purpose, follow the published dosing regimen for a Tylenol (acetaminophen, paracetamol) overdose.

It goes without saying that all three substances (activated charcoal, vitamin C and milk thistle) will also help in situations involving self-inflicted poisoning or overdoses.

GASTROINTESTINAL DISTRESS

How do you deal with gastrointestinal (GI) emergencies—nausea, vomiting or diarrhea that, when severe, may put you at risk of dehydra­tion? Generally, these symptoms have to do with a toxin somewhere in the gut. It may have been delivered to the gut from somewhere else in your body, or it may be food poisoning from something that you recently ate. You probably won’t feel like eating anyway, but I like to emphasize that you should always listen to your body when you have no appetite. In this situation, I recommend water fasting, but even drinking water can be difficult if you are experiencing nausea. Try to sip water as much as possible and stay hydrated.

For GI situations, activated charcoal once again comes to the rescue. Whatever is causing your gut to want to throw up and expel copious liq­uids will be bound up by the charcoal.¹⁰ Taking it in capsule form may be easier, or you can put charcoal powder in a glass of water. With intense nausea, you may feel that you can’t get the charcoal down, but even if you’re vomiting, there is usually a window where the nausea subsides, and that is the perfect time to take the charcoal.

If you are not vomiting but are too nauseous to get the charcoal down, try some ginger and/or fennel. Raw ginger is best, although it can feel a bit intense in the mouth. Take a thin sliver of ginger and simply chew on it. Alternatively, you can make tea out of fresh, powdered or dried ginger. There are also ginger chews marketed for morning sickness. Some form of ginger is a good thing to have in your medicine cabinet. Fennel seeds are also good for this purpose. Chew dried fennel seeds and swallow them; they have a slightly sweet licorice taste that is not too unpleasant and helps relieve nausea. If one of these relieves the nausea enough for you to get some activated charcoal down, then you’re moving in the right direction.

If you have so much vomiting and diarrhea that you are getting dehydrated—to the point where you think you might need IV fluids at the hospital—here is what you can do at home. First, rehydrate yourself orally. When you are dehydrated, your body can absorb more water than normal without peeing it out, so you can drink a pint or quart of fluids every thirty minutes. In a dehydrated state, fluids with a high sugar con­tent, like Gatorade, get absorbed a little bit more quickly. I am not a fan of Gatorade, but in this situation, if you want to drink something sweet, it is not the worst thing you can do. [Editors’ note: An easy homemade electrolyte drink can be made with one and a half to two cups water, the juice of half a lemon, one-fourth teaspoon sea salt and two teaspoons raw honey or maple syrup.¹¹]

Keep up the fluids every half hour until you have reversed the de hydration and are feeling relatively stable. A sensitive way to test how dehydrated you are is to lie down for about three minutes and then sit up. If you sit up and don’t feel lightheaded, then stand up, and if you stand up and don’t feel lightheaded, your hydration is probably decent. However, if you feel even a hint of lightheaded­ness when you stand up, then you need to drink more.

If you are unable to drink more, or you are helping someone else who is unconscious, you can deliver quite a lot of fluids through an enema—something like seven liters a day. This is an excellent way to rehydrate. Saline or salt water or actual filtered seawater (probably not available to most of us) are good to use in this situation. If seawater, you would want to dilute it to the concentration of normal saline (0.9 percent). You can find recipes on the Internet on how to make saline and how much salt to use¹²; use a good-quality salt like you would use for cooking. It does not have to be sterile pharmaceutical-grade salt. Alternatively, you can purchase bottles of sterile saline from medi­cal supply stores and keep some on hand; that will get absorbed more readily than pure water.

With an enema, you can do up to two and a half liters at a time. Leave the enema tube in and refill the bag or bucket when it’s empty until you get to two and a half liters. Try to run the enema water in slowly; take your time and let it absorb. If the body is in a very dehydrated state, it is going to absorb a lot of that water; whatever comes out is going to be far less than what you put in. In this situation, try to keep lying there; if you have the urge to go, resist it as long as possible before you sit on the toilet and let any out. Even if you make a mess, it is better to get the water in if you are dehydrated.

FEVER

How do you recognize a fever? First, you experience chills as your body temperature goes up. Once it hits the peak, it changes direction, and then you start to feel hot as your body cools down; that’s when you start sweating. If you have those symptoms, check your temperature and see where it’s at.

Fever may be uncomfortable, but in general, try to look at fever as a positive thing. A fever is a way that your body is trying to heal. Increasing the body’s temperature helps denature and solubilize any toxins that are floating around that might be involved with the illness that your body is trying to get rid of. Sweating is another way that your body gets rid of things. Your sweat glands are like mini-kidneys, and they can get rid of waste products and toxins just like your kidneys can.

Admittedly, many of us get nervous if our temperature starts climb­ing, but a fever does not become potentially dangerous until around 105 degrees Fahrenheit (a little over 40 degrees Celsius). Moreover, there is really no reason to be nervous because there are simple ways that you can bring the temperature down if you need to. First, keeping in mind that fever is an indication that the body is trying to dump toxins, you can do enemas with distilled water. In this situation, you need to use only one liter of water because you are doing the enema to cleanse or detox, not for rehydration. Enemas help reduce fever and also prevent the need for further fevers because the body can complete the process of dumping out whatever it is trying to get rid of.

If you need to get someone’s temperature down really quickly, get some blankets or sheets sopping wet with cold water. Sandwich the per­son between the wet fabrics and then turn on a big, powerful fan; they will cool down quite precipitously. That is a good way to handle a really high emergency fever at home. (Notice that I did not mention Tylenol or Advil at all in this process; they are not necessary.)

When it comes to fevers in children, about 2 to 5 percent of children between roughly six months and five years of age will experience a febrile seizure. This is a seizure that occurs when a child has a fever greater than around 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and does not have any kind of central nervous system disorder (e.g., multiple sclerosis, brain tumor, meningitis, encephalitis) that could explain the seizure. Febrile seizures usually occur in the form of a generalized tonic-clonic seizure with repeated contraction and relaxation of the muscle. Children who have one febrile seizure are more likely to then have recurrences. However, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), “Febrile seizures are not associated with increased long-term mortality or negative effects on future academic progress, intellect, or behavior.”¹³ [Editors’ note: See sidebar on p. 38 for another perspective on febrile seizures.]

Febrile seizures can be scary to parents. How should they handle this situation? Once again, it is important to stay calm; recognize that this is not a fatal situation and, in all likelihood, will last only a minute or two (though it might seem longer to the concerned parent). The most important thing to know is that you must not restrain someone who is having a seizure or hold them down; you or they could get injured. Instead, carefully create a cushion around or under them, for example, by putting a pillow under their head or wedging pillows between them and the floor. If they have something in their mouth, see if you can get it out by turning them or gently shaking them (or whatever you can do without risking injury to yourself) so that they do not accidentally swallow it or cut the inside of their mouth. Stay with them and get some help when you can. Do the best you can to keep them free from injury during the seizure.

When it’s over, get them in the first-aid position called the recovery position (on one side with one knee over the other).¹⁴ At this point, they may be unconscious or in a “postictal state”—the altered state of con­sciousness or confusion that follows seizures. That state can last anywhere from seconds or less than a minute up to several minutes or an hour at the most. Check the heartbeat and breathing to make sure that nothing more serious is going on, but know that this is a normal post-seizure state. Don’t panic. After you put them in the recovery position, wait for them to either wake up (if they are unconscious) or to become fully oriented (if they are confused). Be comforting, loving, reassuring and patient.

Afterwards, check for any injuries that may have occurred. Did they bite their tongue? Did they bang their head or something else? Make sure nothing hurts and that there are no scrapes or bruises. It is also important to get them as hydrated as possible. All that muscle contraction can cause a little breakdown in the muscle, and toxic metabolites like myoglobin can end up going to the kidneys; they need to be flushed out with good hydration so that the patient doesn’t end up with any kidney damage. Kidney prob­lems are a low risk, but it is still recommended to be aggressive with replenishing water. Because of the risk of future recurrences, also remember enemas as a tool to bring down fever.

WHEN TO CONSIDER GOING TO THE HOSPITAL

In situations where you might want to go to the hospital, I have two caveats. The first is a reminder that if you have cultivated the necessary skills and have the right supplies, it is entirely possible for you to handle many of these events at home. The second is that for truly life-or-death situations, you might not survive anyway; in other words, it might be a moot point whether you go to the hospital.

One situation where a trip to the hospital might be indicated involves displaced frac­tures—where the bones are broken and not lined up properly to heal. You may not know how to get them back in place, or it may be very dif­ficult. Though you can learn how to do this, it has to be done carefully; otherwise, you could risk further injury. An open fracture is when the bone is sticking out of your skin, and you would probably also want to have a surgeon deal with that. Dislocated joints, too, can be dif­ficult to deal with on your own. I once helped, and we needed four men to reduce someone’s dislocated hip.

With very severe burns that cover a large surface area of the body, you would probably need to get pain medicine at the hospital because it would be so excruciating and would be dif­ficult to manage on your own. However, burns that affect a smaller surface area can definitely be managed at home, even with full thickness or what used to be called third-degree burns.

Severe chest wounds (for example, pneumo­thorax, hemothorax or a sucking chest wound) can be managed at home if you know how to put in a chest tube, but barring that, you would definitely want to go to the hospital. In this situation, air or blood collapses your lung and gets between your lung and the chest wall so that you can’t inhale and expand your lung and breathe properly. A knife wound or a gunshot wound to the chest would put you at risk for that complication.

If a body part got partially or fully severed or crushed, you would want to see a reconstruc­tive surgeon, who hopefully could reattach that part of your body or at least make sure that you preserve as much functionality as possible. In this rare situation, it’s important to keep the severed body part clean and chill it on ice to preserve it until you can get to a surgeon. Other situations indicating a visit to a surgeon occur when a part of your body is dead (for example, from severe frostbite); if there is gangrene or necrosis, that could give rise to the need for amputation, and you probably would want a surgeon to do that. (Using maggots could be a very effective at-home strategy in some of those situations because maggots will eat only dead tissue and leave healthy tissue behind, preventing gangrene or blood poisoning from the anaerobic bacteria that are eating up the dead tissue.)

Other situations where a trip to the hospital probably would be indicated are arterial bleed­ing (as already discussed), a throat and neck injury involving the trachea or esophagus that disrupts your breathing or swallowing, or bleed­ing inside your head. With kidney stones, it is only in rare cases that hydronephrosis occurs (swelling of one or both kidneys due to the urine being unable to drain), and this does not happen suddenly—there is time for intervention. Two clients who were being evaluated in the hospital asked me for emergency consultation related to kidney stones. I simply gave instructions to drink one liter of water every thirty minutes until the stone passed. In both cases, the stone passed before the nephrologist came for the consultation, and they went home. There are certainly other scenarios, such as trauma to the eye or joint dislocations, where one might re­ceive helpful services at the emergency depart­ment, but fortunately, most of these situations are quite rare.

NAVIGATING HOSPITALS

Here is a brief anecdote. A client went to the hospital, having developed an out-of-the-blue symptom that he perceived to be serious and distressing. He was not sick before. At the hospital, they quickly were able to do a simple procedure to relieve the symptom, but after con­ducting some tests, they told him he had meta­static cancer and out-of-control blood pressure. At home, his blood pressure had never caused a problem, but they went ahead and administered IV blood pressure medication and were about to transfer him to a cardiac unit—and that is when he talked to me. He had to kick the nurses out of the room to have this conversation. I told him quite frankly, “You may not want to consult with me because if you are going to go into a higher level of care in the hospital, you won’t be able to use the information that I might provide—they won’t allow you to do things that would help, unless it is something they suggest.” Much to my surprise, this brave gentleman made the deci­sion to leave the hospital. He had to face nurses and doctors trying to scare him and convince him otherwise, and the police even came into his room at one point, but they couldn’t stop someone in their right mind from leaving. He walked out of there, went home and decided he was going to use natural methods to take care of his health. And he never looked back. This story shows that it is possible, even in difficult situations, to be brave and do what you think is right for you. When you walk into a hospital, you have to walk in with the attitude that this is your life and your body; you are in charge of what happens.

Commerce governs hospitals, and every­thing in commerce works by contracts. When you walk in the door, hospitals are going to want to have you enter into and sign one or more contracts. A contract might pertain to financial arrangements related to medical treatment, or to how they will handle your personal health information. In situations involving children, contracts sometimes give guardianship to the hospital—this has been seen in some prenatal care consent contracts. A typical patient regis­tration “consent to treat” form shows exactly what they will ask you to agree to and sign in order to receive care at the emergency depart­ment or anywhere in the hospital. Here is what one form says:

“I consent to examination, diagnosis and general medical care and treatment (includ­ing, but not limited to, physical examina­tion, administration of medications and vaccinations, recordings, and photographs for diagnosis and/or treatment, diagnostic tests, laboratory tests, and other minor pro­cedures) to be performed by my physician, advanced practice provider, or any other associates of [hospital name].”¹⁵

In this single form, you are telling them that they can provide whatever treatment or diagnosis they want, including giving you any medicines they want, shooting you up with any vaccines they want, making recordings and photographs of your body parts, doing any diag­nostic tests they want (including imaging stud­ies, biopsies and lab tests) and doing procedures such as lumbar puncture or catheterization. The consent basically extends to almost anything but full surgery or full radiation therapy—but it could include chemotherapy because that is considered a “medication.” With one signature, you have approved all that! They could come in and give you a Covid shot based on this type of consent. They could do it while you are sleep­ing without even telling you—and they do. I once experienced this myself, before I knew about natural healing. I was in the hospital for appendicitis. A nurse came in and put morphine in my IV without telling me in advance. I didn’t even want it—and I only found out when I felt the “takeoff.”

The next part of the form says, “I under­stand that I am responsible for payment for all services rendered.” In other words, they do what they want, and then you are obligated to pay for it, even though they don’t provide you with a price list and you don’t know what they are going to do. They are asking you to pay an un­known amount that could be half a million dol­lars if you have complications and need surgery or intensive care. How can you enter into such an unreasonable agreement? Would you go to buy a car and sign a contract that said, “I’ll pay whatever amount you want to charge me?” That is essentially what you are agreeing to when you sign a hospital form like this. Obviously, it is not in your best interest. I recommend that you take the time to read through these types of consent forms so that you understand what they really say.

Instead, use alternative language, crossing out whatever is on their consent form and writ­ing in the alternative, or printing it out ahead of time and bringing it with you. You can also hand­write it, and handwriting might even be better because there is a law that says that when there is both handwriting and typewritten information on a contract, the handwritten information takes precedence. Although many hospitals provide these contracts on a computer screen, it’s well within your rights to ask them to print out the documents for execution. After you modify and sign, they can scan it into their system. Here is some alternative language you can use:

“I do not consent to any procedure except for history-taking and routine physical examination. I do not consent to any phar­maceutical drugs, vaccinations, laboratory studies, bedside or other non-surgical pro­cedures, surgery, imaging studies or other interventions. I do not consent to sharing my personal health information with any parties aside from my immediate health providers. I reserve all rights to make health care decisions independently and provide informed consent according to my will and timeline. I will provide or refuse consent for each and every proposed medi­cal procedure, diagnostic or therapeutic, on a case-by-case basis. If you administer any diagnostic or therapeutic intervention without my express consent, you will be held liable for any and all damages, civil and criminal, I may incur.”

What they are really supposed to do in the first place is tell you about the risks and benefits of whatever they are proposing, the risks and benefits of the alternatives and the risks and benefits of not doing anything—and then you are supposed to decide whether you want to do that thing or not. So, all you are doing is exerting your natural right to provide informed consent for each medical procedure. And when you go into the hospital without signing the consent form in the regular way, you might even discover that the hospital treats you more respectfully and becomes more accommodating, letting you do things they normally wouldn’t allow, such as bringing in your own food.

In the event that you are unconscious or otherwise unable to make medical decisions yourself, it is very important to have a desig­nated person who will make these decisions for you, and of course, it should be someone who knows and respects your wishes. Obviously, you need to select and talk with them in advance. You can create and sign a legal form that says, “If I should become incapacitated or unable in any way to make my own health decisions, I designate [specify Name, Phone Number, Re­lationship] as my health care proxy and power of attorney to provide consent to all proposed medical procedures and interventions per the terms above.” Another alternative is to prepare a living will where you put all your health care decisions in advance, or everything you can think of in every contingency. This is a legal document, and you can file it with all the hos­pitals in your area ahead of time (or even with the public health department if you so choose), or give a copy to your next of kin to deliver in this kind of situation. Living wills are definitely worth looking into.

CONCLUSION

Medical emergencies present a stressful situation. Truth seekers may have to rely on hospitals to manage common emergencies and submit to allopathic strategies if they are unpre­pared with the right knowledge. While the ma­jority of the population will remain dependent on allopathic facilities for urgent health crises, the educated natural healing advocate can learn simple techniques and strategies to manage most medical emergencies at home. In fact, even emergencies such as seizures, poisoning and heart attacks can have superior outcomes with appropriate natural healing protocols compared to expensive and dangerous hospital interventions.

Hospitals utilize legal strategies to usurp your decision-making sovereignty when it comes to emergency and inpatient medical treat­ment. Typical consent forms bind you contractu­ally to waive your informed consent so that the doctors can decide for you. As mentioned, some consents for prenatal care even award guardian­ship of the newborn to the hospital! Financial contracts bind you to pay whatever price the hospital deems profitable, such as eighteen dollars for a fifteen-cent acetaminophen tablet. Although there are some rare occasions when the hospital can be life- and limb-saving, you must carefully navigate these legal documents to protect your rights.

Ultimately, making the commitment to take responsibility for your own health and become independent from emergency departments, hospitals and the allopathic system as a whole is a process that can be very rewarding. It helps to seek fellowship and support with others who are like-minded. Now is the perfect time to learn this information and become your own health authority.

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SIDEBARS

FEBRILE SEIZURES AND VACCINES [By the Wise Traditions editors]

The medical literature acknowledges that certain vaccines and vaccine combinations are risk factors for febrile sei­zures.¹⁶ As Childrenʼs Health Defense (CHD) pointed out in a 2018 article about vaccines as a trigger for early childhood febrile seizures, the incidence of initial and recurrent febrile seizures is highest in the same developmentally critical time period when young children receive multiple vaccines.¹⁷ Vaccines associated with increased febrile seizure risk include mRNA Covid shots; measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) and measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccines; combination vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, polio and Haemophilus influenzae type b (DTaP-IPV-Hib); pneumo­coccal conjugate vaccines (PCV); flu shots administered with other shots; and the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) shots still given in many lower-income countries.^17,18

CHD adds: “In the past, child health experts regarded febrile seizures as mostly benign, but this relaxed attitude is now undergoing reconsideration as atypical ‘febrile seizure syndromes’ become more common. In a study reported in the Annals of Neurology, almost one-fifth (18 percent) of children who experienced their first febrile seizure had prolonged seizures lasting, on average, 40 minutes. These more complex febrile seizures, when prolonged and/or recurrent, greatly increase the risk of subsequent neurological disorders,” including developmental delays, Tourette syndrome, temporal lobe epilepsy and hippocampal sclerosis.¹⁷

A WORD ABOUT THE UNIFORM COMMERCIAL CODE

The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) governs commercial transactions, including hospital contracts because hospitals are in commerce. UCC Section 1-304, “Obligation of Good Faith,” states, “Every contract or duty within the [UCC] imposes an obligation of good faith in its performance and enforcement.”¹⁹ What this means is that there has to be honesty and the observance of reasonable standards of fairness or fair dealing. If a hospital is asking you to agree to pay any possible sum, that’s not fair—you don’t have to agree to that.

To reserve your rights to not agree with something that is unfair or not in good faith, there is UCC Section 1-308, “Performance or Acceptance Under Reservation of Rights,” which states, “A party that with explicit reservation of rights performs or promises performance or assents to performance in a manner demanded or offered by the other party does not thereby prejudice the rights reserved. Such words as ‘without prejudice,’ ‘under protest,’ or the like are suf­ficient.”²⁰ This “Reservation of Rights” clause “allows individuals and businesses to reserve certain rights that may not be explicitly stated in a contract of agreement,” and it “allows parties to reserve the right to take legal action” in the event of a dispute.²¹ If you sign and reserve your rights in advance—for example, your human rights, your natural rights, your constitutional rights—then whatever you agree to can’t violate your rights or it’s invalid. Basically, you are saying, “I agree to these terms as long as they don’t violate my rights.”

To specify that reserving your rights is what you intend, you can write, “I reserve all rights without prejudice” and then reference this section of the law. Now imagine that the hospital tells you, “If you don’t sign this document or this contract, you can’t get treatment in this hospital.” That is clearly duress, and that invalidates the contract. If you note in your signature that it’s “under duress” or “under protest” and you reference Section 1-308 of the law, then essentially that contract cannot be enforced.

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15. https://www.stelizabethphysicians.com/care/access-to-care/patient-forms-and-documents/
16. Monfries N, Goldman RD. Prophylactic antipyretics for prevention of febrile seizures following vaccination. Can Fam Physician. 2017 Feb;63(2):128-130.
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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2024

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