Winter is the time of the year when the air is so dry that skin irritations blossom and – worse! – one seems to have a bad hair day every single day.
Get ready for a warm oil bath! Any vegetal oil will do: Olive is perfect, but I have used other oils too. The original idea comes from Ayurvedic Medicine; they use sesame oil. Coconut oil has the finest smell.
Don’t use commercial bath oil preparations as they contain preservatives, even luxury ones. Often they are mineral-oil based. You really need plant oils. Nut oils work well, unless you have allergies. If you like the smell, add a drop of essential oil to your warm oil, like rosemary, thyme, oregano, rose, etc.
It is easy to do, just a bit messy. I have done it in the sauna, on a big towel, or in the shower. In the shower, make sure to stand on a small towel because you will be slippery like a fish, and I don’t want you to fall.
Warm about half a cup of oil, either in a second pot with hot water, or on the radiator, or with a tea light. Don’t use the microwave! Stand by when you heat the oil! It easily can get too hot – make sure it is just nicely warm.
Take the pot with oil into the shower stall and rub it into every nook and cranny of your body: ears, nose, between the toes, into all body folds. Pour it over your scalp deliberately and hair and rub it in. Let it work for ten minutes or longer.
Wash your hair well, twice, with shampoo. Don’t forget the short cold shower at the end!
Your hair will fall smoothly again and your itchy skin calms down – until it is time for the next warm oil bath, in about two weeks. Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
Totally Unproven Pet Theories of Mine
September 9, 2010
Yesterday I refuted some of medicine’s pet tenets. Today I tell you some of my private unproven theories (hypotheses):
1. If you eat a lot of berries and cherries during the summer, it gears up your immune system and you make it through the winter healthier. - We know that berries are healthy because of their antioxidants – but as far as I know there has been no study done if the effect lasts for the whole next winter.
2. Similarly, if you smell a lot of roses (or other flowers) you get through the winter less depressed. No study here, either. But the nose and the olfactory part of the brain are closely linked to the “feelings” part of the brain (limbic system). – Besides, what other reasons would there be that we like so much to smell good things than to ward off depression? Aromatherapy uses that connection, too – but I am not sure there solid studies exist.
More to come! Read More
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The Man I Most Admire
June 30, 2010
Today is the perfect summer day outside: Warm but not too hot. With brilliant light, the roses in their second flush. So I want to go out into the garden, and give you just a tiny thought for the day.
In my life, I have met interesting people of all kinds of walks. Can't say I tend to worship heroes - but here is one:
Many years ago I had a patient, a friendly middle-aged (aside: I am always astonished what Americans call “middle-aged”; where I come from, “middle-aged” is from thirty to fifty…) small man, a light-colored black man, working as a janitor. As it turned out, with some Native American blood thrown in.
The Native American blood must have made him prone to diabetes – he certainly was not overweight. But he was eager to accommodate to some lifestyle changes. When I said “No cake, no cookies,” he shuffled on his chair, and asked “Not even for birthdays?” We negotiated birthdays exceptions.
But for several visits, his sugars did not come down. I finally decided to get a bit deeper into the cookie business, mindful of the former hospital patient who had agreed to a “one cookie per day” policy, and whose sugars were so abject that we could not send her home. When I inquired about that one cookie, she nodded to the drawer of her nightstand, giving me permission to see for myself. I found a “cookie” the size of a dinner plate. Only one, though: She had stuck to our agreement…
With that in mind, I sat my nice little man down and asked him how many birthdays there were in his life. Turned out he had about ten children and who knows how many grand-children - it boiled down to at least a birthday a week!
You wonder why he is the man I most admire? He got all his children through college – including the one son who was wheelchair-bound from an accident. This nice, unassuming man had, against all odds, kept his family together and made a success out of his life.
Who is your hero? Read More