I know a lot of people are worried about the cost of health care and the effects of modern medicine. I see many people turning to ‘natural’ cures like herbal concoctions instead of going to the doctor and that honestly scares me.

I’m actually a big believer in healing from within, but natural cures shouldn’t be done willy-nilly without consulting a health professional. Just because it’s “natural”, doesn’t mean it’s safe. Herb and supplements ARE medicine too, they’re just not regulated by the FDA like Big Pharma’s are. Not to mention that many common supplements can actually interact with life saving medications.

For the love of Pete, do some real research before you start popping any pill, including a supplement.  And I do mean real research, not just looking up any old article on the intertubes. Look for real scientific studies done for peer-reviewed journals and ask an honest-to-jebus medical professional about it. No, that hippy chick at Whole Foods doesn’t count. There are many natural things you can do for your body that are extremely helpful and there are just as many that are toxic and potentially deadly.

In any case, here are 5 Cheap (or Free), Natural, and SAFE things you can do for yourself to improve your health:

1. Get enough sleep. How much is enough depends on the individual, but 7-8 is a good guideline. Lack of sleep seriously affects many aspects of your life, including your general health. If you aren’t getting enough sleep and you’ve already tried the usual remedies, it is time to talk to a health professional.
2. Drink enough water. Again, how much is enough depends on the individual. In general, 64oz is a good starting point, but remember that too much water can actually be dangerous, so don’t go guzzling several gallons a day. Dehydration affects a whole host of body functions, so get into the habit of bringing a refillable water bottle around with you.
3. Eat a healthy, balanced diet. Vitamin supplements can certainly help, but getting your nutrients from your food (where they’re usually most easily digestible) is preferable. You can consult your doctor for more information.
4. Get some exercise. 2-3 hours a week of moderate exercise is the current recommendation. You don’t need fancy equipment or an expensive gym membership. Go outside and walk briskly. Or play tag with your kids. Or climb up and down some stairs. Pop in an exercise DVD. Just get your butt in gear. As always, talk to your doctor before starting any exercise regimen.
5. Brush and floss your teeth properly. You should be brushing at least twice a day and preferably after every meal. Poor oral hygiene has been linked to everything from bad breath to heart disease, so take 5 minutes a day and brush your teeth.’

If everyone in America did these 5 things, our health care costs would drop dramatically as our general health improved.

Got any ‘natural’ tips for staying healthy?

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The Consumer’s Union (you know, the guys who bring you the Consumer’s Report) have built a handy little website to explain how the Health Care Reform will affect people.

Check It Out Here

Maybe now people will STFU about Death Panels, socialism and other hysterical bullshit.

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I love how the media likes to pretend that acne is a teen problem and that people magically grow out of it when they hit their college years. Yeah, right. I suffer from hormonal acne and right now my hormones are crazy because of the miscarriage and so is my acne. Why don’t you rub a little more salt on my wounds, Nature? *shakes fist*

Usually I can control my acne quite easily (and without crazy chemicals) by gently exfoliating daily with a light baking soda and water paste. If it’s that time of the month, I’ll sometimes add a sliver or two of bar soap, but I don’t use any actual ‘acne’ treatments. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been cutting it for the past week or so.

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For those of you wondering what H1N1 is, it’s the swine flu. I am NOT a doctor or health official, so this post (like all others) should be taken with a grain of salt.

Planning

Make sure you have checked your sick days. Will your employer grant you extra sick days so you don’t infect other employees? If you do not have sick days, do you have enough in your emergency fund to cover unpaid leave? Do you have health insurance? If you do not have health insurance, do you have enough in your emergency fund to cover the doctor’s visit and anti-viral medication?

If you have children, what will you do if the school or day care closes because of a suspected case of swine flu? What will you do if your child is infected and cannot go to school/daycare? If you become ill, will you send your children to stay with someone else?

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Nature has once again vividly reminded me that I’m not pregnant, today’s post is going to be about every woman’s least favorite time of the month. If you are not in the mood for a very frank discussion on bodily functions, now would be a good time to stop reading.

You have several options to save money on your choose of feminine hygiene product. (Side rant here, but I HATE that name for tampons and pads. My vulva isn’t dirty, I just need something to catch the outflow.)

1. Skip the ‘extras’ on commercial products.

First off, never put any perfumed product in or on your bits. Perfumed products can cause serious irritation and if your genitals smell bad you need to go to the doctor, not cover it up.

Secondly, you don’t really need plastic applicators for tampons, cardboard ones work just fine. Some brave ladies can even save by using O.B. brand without applicators. If you have trouble inserting a tampon, try placing one foot up on the toilet or coughing lightly as you insert to relax your muscles.

Third, despite what the commercials would like you to believe, there’s not all that much difference between brands among products with the same absorbancy levels. If you are changing your chosen product regularly, you can safely use a ‘store’ brand.

2. Use a ‘Green’ Product

Any non-squeamish sewers can make reusable cloth pads.Here is an excellent tutorial on making them, caring for them, and why you should stop being freaked out by the very idea.

While you can’t roll your own tampons, you can use sea sponges, which last around four months. There are a few ‘brands’ of sea sponges for this purpose (like Sea Pearls) but there’s no real reason not to use a sponge you’ve sanitized yourself.

Sea sponges are NOT for the squeamish. Removing them can be a  bloody mess and you will have to rinse them out when they are full. This really bothers some women in public ladies’ rooms. You also need to boil them before storage between periods. Another ugly problem is that like all sponges, when they are full they are full. Laughing or somehow squeezing your pelvic muscles when it’s full could could result in a gush.

3. Try a Menstrual Cup

Once again, not for squeamish people who don’t want to deal with their genitals or what comes out of it. Menstrual cups sit up near the cervix and collect fluid rather than absorbing it. There is no string, so you will be reaching up into yourself to remove the cup.

Menstrual cups last the longest of all the options, which make them a good option. They also come in various sizes which can help with fitting every body type.

Virgins and really petite or young women sometimes have trouble at first adjusting to the larger size of the cup. This is easily solved with a little stretching (the cup is no wider than the average penis after all.)

If you’re interested in using a menstrual cup, the Menstrual_Cups LiveJournal Community is incredibly informative and friendly.

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My mother-in-law has to go in for some sort of test because her white blood cell count was low. This, of course, is a scary thing on the medical front, but also on the financial front.

MIL is living hand to mouth because of poor financial planning and has no medical insurance. Mr. and I just forked over $2,000 so she could have this test immediately (no pussy footing around when the diagnosis could be cancer).

We cannot keep doing this and I am going to have to be the bad guy here and put my foot down. Not only are there two adult sons living with MIL who aren’t paying rent, but Mr. and I will be buying a house next spring and can’t keep sending her our down payment (and if all goes well, bringing a new Frugal Urbanite into the world some time next year.)

Don’t get me wrong, we wouldn’t let MIL get booted from her apartment or have her suffer for lack of medical treatment, but some things are definitely going to have to change. Number one being her getting her ass in gear and finding some sort of assistance paying the medical bills, whether it’s from medical insurance or help from the government. The two at home are also going to have to start paying their fair share of expenses (including rent, food, utilities). Finally, MIL is going to have to either start cutting expenses or bringing more money home (she’s only working part time) because Mr. and I can’t support her and still live our own lives.

Just because you are healthy now, doesn’t mean you will stay healthy forever.  All it takes is one or two expensive diagnostic tests or one little hospital stay without insurance to wipe out your emergency fund (you do have one, right?) and if you end up with a chronic disease, you could spiral further and further into debt.

You NEED health insurance, even if it’s just catastrophic coverage.

Photo by Beesnail

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No post yesterday because I took Mr. to get the last two of his wisdom teeth removed.

The grand total out of pocket for the both the procedure and the painkiller/antibiotics: $28.50

I’ve had friends question why we have all the supplemental insurance that Mr.’s job has to offer, and between the two eye exams, 4 trips to the dentist’s, 6 boxes of contacts and one oral surgery, I think we have spent $100 out of pocket. If we were paying up front, I honestly don’t think we would go to the dentist as often as we should, we’d be putting off our eye exams, etc…

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In the interest of frugality, I am eating the sugar cookies I baked last night as breakfast. I’ve got about four dozen and they’re going to be hard and yucky in two or three days, so the obvious (and frugal) solution is to eat them all up before them.

Todays post is about dieting frugally (stop looking at me like that.) I hope most of this will be obvious to people, but sometimes it’s amazingly easy to overlook the obvious, especially if you’re on the Atkins Diet and having a bread craving. I am not a dietitian, so take my advice at your own risk.

1. Go to your doctor first! It’s cheaper to get a checkup now than to be sent to the hospital with heart palpitations or in a diabetic coma. Your doctor can tell you of any diets you absolutely cannot do and give you other info as well.
2. Don’t pay for your diet info. You can usually borrow any diet or nutrition literature from a library or from someone who has already given up on it. If you want to own a copy, find a secondhand book shop, thrift store or garage sale and look around, there’s usually tons of them around.
3. Fad diets don’t work and are expensive. The only diet supplement you need to be taking is a multi-vitamin (with iron and calcium if you’re a lady.) The simplest diet plan is free and has been proven for centuries: Consume less calories than you are using. (Or even simpler: Less Food + More Exercise = Good!) Unless you have a medical disorder, this should work for you to.
4. Track what’s going in your mouth. Just like you track your spending, track every little morsel that goes in your mouth for a few days, from the sugar cookies you ate for breakfast to those candies you snitched off of the secretary’s desk. You’ll be surprised at how much and what you’re actually eating (and how expensive those extra calories are.) Once you’ve identified problem areas (like that donut and Coke you had as an afternoon snack) you can work on them.
5. Eat breakfast (at home.) Aside from the medical benefits of eating a healthy breakfast, you’re less likely to stop for McD’s or a doughnut on the way to work or to snag something from a vending machine as a mid-morning snack.
6. Bring your own food to work. If you bring your own lunch and snacks, you can control what you eat and the cost of what you eat.

Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg on dieting, but there are entire websites for that. The important thing is that dieting doesn’t require you to pay a ton of money for pills that make you crap your pants or tiny, frozen dinners shipped to your doorstep.

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Mindless eating will not help your waistline or your wallet. So what is ‘Mindless Eating?’

Have you ever sat down with a bag of chips to watch TV or started munching cookies while talking on the phone? I’ve even been known to sit down with a good book and a bowl of pretzels. An hour later, you realize that you’ve eaten half that bag of chips and you didn’t even know it.

Mindless eating is not eating for enjoyment or for nutrition, but because the food is there. You end up wasting food and money on empty calories.

Should you stop eating any and all snacks while you entertain yourself? While you could, you don’t need to deny yourself the occasional treat. The solution to stopping mindless eating is quite simple.

1. Don’t store food any place but the kitchen or pantry. This includes things like candy bowls.
2. Educate yourself on proper serving sizes. Read the labels on your treats and make sure you’re clear on how many calories are going down the hatch.
3. When you want a snack, serve yourself a single serving and then put the container back. It’s much harder to mindlessly overindulge if you have to get up to get more.
4. If measuring out 2/3 of a cup of Chex Mix every time seems like too much work, pre-measure your snacks into snack-sized sandwich baggies. Don’t forget you can reuse the bags! (Don’t buy ‘single serving’ sized of anything at the market. You are just paying for extra packaging.)

• Consider waiting until the show/phonecall/whatever is over to have your snack. You will enjoy your food more if you can give your full attention to what’s going into your mouth.
• If you are out in public and can’t bring your own snacks (or just want to indulge,) split the snack between a few people. You really shouldn’t eat that entire bucket of popcorn yourself anyway!

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Taking care of yourself is one of those ways of being frugal that we often overlook, but it makes a ton of sense when you think about it. When you are healthy, you will miss less work, spend less money on doctors visits (a real expense if you work for a company that doesn’t offer benefits,) less money on over-the-counter medications, and less money on beauty supplies.

Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean spending a lot of money either. The changes that make the most impact are actually the cheapest.

The first changes two are something that a lot of urbanites need to do, but will find difficult because of our tendency to enjoy our nights out:

1. If you smoke, quit it. You will save money immediately (cigarettes are so expensive!) and in the long run.
2. Cut back on your alcohol consumption. Again, you will save money immediately and the health benefits of cutting back are well worth the moderation.

The next few changes are also easy but will make big difference:

• Drink your 64 oz. of liquid a day. Contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t have to be all water, although that’s a frugal option. If you can stand the idea of chugging eight glass of water, try flavoring it will a few drops of lemon juice and making sure it’s ice old.
  • Being properly hydrated will solve quite a few common issues. A lot of people find themselves getting headaches from dehydration (that’s what that horrible hangover headache is from, in fact,) some common ‘intestinal issues’ are also solved by getting enough fluid, and your skin will start to look better within a few days
• Take a good multi-vitamin.
  • You don’t have to waste a ton of money on twenty different vitamins from the expensive health food stores. You only need 100% of your vitamins and your body can’t retain any excess B or C vitamins. Ladies should look for a vitamin with folic acid, calcium and iron.
• Get in your daily exercise.
  • Expensive equipment isn’t necessary to get your body moving, neither is an expensive gym membership. Just walking will do the trick. If you can’t find time to exercise, try sneaking it in by parking farther from work, getting off the bus or subway a stop early and walking, taking stairs instead of elevators or going for a short work during your coffee or lunch break.

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