Use a hair blow-dryer.  That’s it.  If you’re away from home or don’t have one, SOME hot air hand dryers in public restrooms let you swivel the nozzle so you can dry your face, but many don’t swivel.

Blowing warm air in your ear kills the bad bacteria living in the tissues nearby.  Any germs that feast on you prefer the same temperature as your body, just below 100 degrees F.  When you get sick and develop a fever, the purpose is to kill germs that can’t thrive at higher temperatures.  (If your temperature gets too high, above 105 degrees, brain damage sets in.  That’s why hot tubs are regulated, usually by law, to never get above 104 degrees.)  So, a good fever is between 100 and 104 degrees.

Next time you have an earache, or even if it’s just getting started, blow some warm air on it.  Hair dryers also have a ‘cool’ button that blows air without heating it.  Switch the cool in and out to keep your skin from getting too hot.  Try different speed settings, too.  You want to gently dry your ear canal, not abuse it.

Don’t overdo it.  Burning yourself will just weaken your tissue and make it even easier for germs to eat you (face it, that’s what they do).

Outdoors, a hat, earmuffs, a ski band, balaclava, or a raised collar can help.  Simply stuffing a little piece of soft paper tissue in your ears will help by blocking cold air and sealing in warmth.  Or, hold your hands over your ears.  They can all look a little silly.  Which do you prefer, looking silly, or pain that could lead to hearing loss?

Drying or warming your ears works great any time you finish bathing or swimming, especially if you’ll go outside on a cold or windy day.  The moisture inside your ear canals is slow to evaporate, and as it evaporates, it drains heat away.  The cold slows down blood circulation in there, making it harder for your body to bring nutrients and blood to the area to fight germs.

If your earache persists or gets worse, obviously see a doctor.  Even a lowbrow walk-in clinic may be a better choice than doing nothing or waiting.  An infection can spread quickly and destroy your hearing.  Permanently.  There are other things that can cause an earache besides what’s covered here.

If you have too much earwax, you can get a kit at any drugstore (under $5) that has a peroxide-type chemical (do NOT use hydrogen peroxide — it’s too strong) and a water bulb to soften wax and dirt and flush it out.  Use the bulb very gently or you can irritate the sensitive lining in your ear canal.  Do not stick Q-Tips into your ear canal to remove wax.  A friend or ours did that, then heard a loud rushing sound (and pain) as she accidentally punctured her eardrum (in order to vibrate 15,000 times a second it must be very thin and soft).  Obviously, even after healing, her ear will never hear as well as it used to.

Ditto for loud noises, too.  Protect your ears from loud sounds, especially if they continue over time.  Hearing loss from loud noise is all cumulative.  It’s so gradual, you’ll never notice while it’s leaving you.  And you can never go back.  (Contrary to popular belief, hearing aids and asking everyone to repeat themselves are not sexy.)  Kitchen blender kind of noisy?  Cover your ears.  Running a leaf blower or lawn mower?  Obtain some cheap ear plugs, or plug your ears with bits of paper tissue if you have nothing else.

That loud music at the party last night still has your ears ringing?  That’s the final cry of dying nerve endings that used to hear things; they’ll never hear anything again.  Alcohol makes it much worse by weakening the muscles that try to clamp your eardrum when you hear loud noises, so drinking around loud noises makes you lose your hearing even faster.

Good luck,

Charlie Gosh

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Learn a simple trick to take advantage of the next recession . . .  http://www.charliegosh.com/?p=97

But what are these mystery ingredients? Their name gives no clue what they’re actually made of.

Up until the late 18th century, if you wanted strawberry flavor in a food, you needed fresh strawberries.  Then about 130 years ago, chemists found a wonderful new solution for food companies; coal tar.  Mine coal from the ground, crush it, mix with water, cook it to make a thick soup, heat it up, evaporate the vapors, cool them and one of the (many) things you get is  .  .  .  artificial strawberry flavor.

It was a boon to the food industry.  For the first time in history, they could have strawberry flavor year-round.  Or, at least something that fools your taste buds into thinking it’s strawberry.

Years later, an even better source was found.  Crude oil.  That’s right, Texas Tea.  Black Gold.  Petroleum.  Yeah, that stuff.

Chemists found they could distill a whole army of new products from crude oil, and coal tar fell from favor.  Gasoline, kerosene, jet fuel, diesel fuel, motor oil, axle grease, anti-freeze, insecticides, pesticides, mildewcides, rodenticides, bike helmets, pharmaceuticals, food wrap, toys, CD’s (and their cases), vinyl siding, trash bags, plumbing, lawn furniture, artificial strawberry flavor, artificial blueberry flavor, almond flavor, banana, grape, orange, vanilla, yellow coloring, red, green, blue  .   .   .   You name it, the list just goes on and on and on.  It’s really very versatile stuff.

But it’s not food.   Artificial colors and flavors are made from crude oil.

Put it in your gas tank?  Stinky.  Put it in your mouth and eat it?  You can do better.

Strangely enough, this branch of chemistry is called “organic chemistry“ while everything else is called “inorganic chemistry.”  Organic food producers must really love this little irony.

Crude oil is simply all the plants and critters that were growing a long time ago, all smooshed together.  If we did that today, it would be like filling a giant blender with everything around us – corn stalks, poison dart frogs, mosquitoes, bacteria, sunflower roots, oak leaves, poison ivy, tree bark, sulfur, arsenic, lead, poison mushrooms, cherry blossoms, some stuff that’s good for us, some stuff that isn’t, plants that slow our heartbeat or make our hair fall out (or grow thicker), quite a few things that cause cancer, probably a few that cure it.  Everything.  Blend well, cover with dirt and let it brew for 65 million years.

So, the next time you read a food label (you do read ’em, don’t you?) and you see artificial color, artificial flavor, BHA, BHT, propylene glycol, or almost anything else you can’t pronounce, at least you’ll know where it came from, even if you still won’t know what it is.  You’d need an advanced chemistry degree to really understand it.  And it won’t be strawberry, even if they can fool you.

It’s not food.  It’s not good for you.  That’s why they won’t list “made from crude oil by-products” on the label.

Charlie Gosh

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Tobacco has a big secret that will astonish you . . .  http://www.charliegosh.com/?p=48

Learn a simple trick to take advantage of the next recession . . .  http://www.charliegosh.com/?p=97

When research scientists add up the risk factors from all the chemical ingredients in tobacco, they’re way below the number of actual deaths from smoking.

Statistically, the chemicals in tobacco are far less dangerous than we think.

The numbers don’t add up. They’re not even close.

When you plug in Tobacco’s Big Secret, suddenly all the risk vs. death numbers match up.

The secret?   Tobacco smoke is radioactive.

It’s true.  Google it, or look it up on Wikipedia.

Since the late 1930′s, the tobacco industry has been using a really cheap fertilizer made from the mineral apatite (pronounced just like appetite) that gives tobacco a ‘sweet’ taste (their description, not mine).

Unfortunately, apatite in its natural form has uranium, radioactive polonium, radioactive radon, radioactive lead, radioactive bismuth, and a lot more nasty radioactive stuff all mixed inside.

Apatite is radioactive.

It's cheap, it's tasty, and it's so hot it's SMOKIN'!

Apatite is mined, crushed, processed into a phosphate fertilizer, then applied to the soil in tobacco fields. The radioactive pieces break free, hitch a ride on air currents and bits of dust, then get stuck on the gooey hairs and leaves of the plant. Each year, adding more fertilizer makes the soil — and the plants — even more radioactive.

But remember, it’s cheap and makes the final product taste ‘sweet’  ( YUCK ! )  so they’ll never want to stop using it.

The radioactive chunks stay stuck on through the manufacturing process and are freed when the tobacco is burned. Burning does not “clean” the radioactive particles, it just spreads them into the air.

The smoker inhales this witch’s brew of varied radioactive particles. Many get glued to the lung tissue by the tar in the smoke and start damaging tissue right away, while others take minutes, days, months or years to cause their damage.  Some are exhaled and combine with the smoke from the cigarette’s burning end to mix with other second-hand smoke that spreads around the area.  The entire area becomes mildly radioactive.

Yep, second-hand smoke is radioactive, too.  That’s the actual reason it’s so harmful.

The pieces that remain in the lungs bombard internal organs with nuclear particles long after death.  The damage from each radioactive molecule is small, but they’re cumulative. Each day is a little worse than the day before.

How much atomic radiation are we talking about? An op-ed piece in the New York Times in late 2006 tried to flesh out some numbers.

Some scientists try to compare the tissue damage from cigarettes to that caused by a chest X-ray, though they’re not exactly the same kind of damage (one is a ray, this one is a particle that has actual mass and volume and causes far more tissue damage).  Older studies get much lower numbers by comparing 1980′s-style X-ray machines, so some old studies quote 300 chest X-rays per year, while others compare 2,000 “modern” chest X-rays each year to a pack-a-day smoker.  Modern digital X-ray machines use even less radiation, so comparisons today would be even higher.

You can read some facts at the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website on Radiation in Tobacco and Radiation Protection – Tobacco Smoke (intended to protect workers whose jobs involve radioactive specimens) or you can Google the topic and learn more. This would make a great science project for students of any age.

Check out this United States National Institutes of Health NIH.gov training page .  The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements has a web page too.  They list a chest X-ray at 8 mrem, a year’s worth of average exposure to ordinary stuff like bricks, radon in the basement, air travel (cosmic rays), etc., at 360 mrem (or about 1 mrem each day), and a year of pack-and-a-half a day smoking at 16,000 mrem.

Those figures put less than 1 cigarette per day at more than all the other background radiation we all get. But the radiation from tobacco smoke is the worst kind of all for tissue damage.  Alpha particles are pieces of actual matter (instead of a ray of energy) made up of 2 neutrons and 2 protons that bang physically into our own tissue.  It’s literally having nucleii blasting into your body about 1/8 of an inch deep, at the speed of light.  Repeat forever.  Other nuclear events, beta rays and gamma rays, take their turns, too, but the alpha particles do the bulk of the damage.

Even worse, since it creams delicate internal tissues instead of the top (dead) layer of skin, it’s much deadlier than simple background radiation.

Your body tries to heal itself, but it has limits.  Damage is spread through the entire body by the bloodstream, so healing is difficult and, eventually, impossible.

When the radiation risk factor is added to the chemical risk factors, the death numbers finally add up.

Bonus: It turns out that people are about 20 times more likely to die from lung cancer today than they were before apatite was used for fertilizer, in spite of much lower smoking rates and tremendous improvements in medical care.  Now that’s progress.

While smoking rates went down . . .

The entire PowerPoint presentation from the American Cancer Society can be downloaded from http://www.cancer.org/Search/index?QueryText=cancerstatistic2009slidesrevpp.ppt&x=32&y=17 or

http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@nho/documents/document/cancerstatistic2009slidesrevpp.ppt

The story goes that U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop tried to warn the public of all this 20 years ago in a televised message, but went largely unheard.  Unfortunately, I can’t find any evidence that he ever said that.  Maybe this industry does a really good job of burying things.  I guess that would include their lifelong customers.

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By the way, in the U.S.,

smoking kills about 1 in every 5 people,

about the same percentage that smokes (20% of the U.S. population). Does anyone else see a pattern here? It sounds like everyone who smokes dies of a smoking-related illness.  Smokers, on average, live about 12 to 15 years less than non-smokers, and many of those years are very unpleasant.

Of course, there are always stories about George Burns smoking cigars until he was 95.  But folks his age grew up in a time when food was wholesome and fresh, air was clean, and walking for miles every day was pretty routine.  He got a much better head start on his life than you or me.  And remember that imported tobacco, like the kind used in expensive cigars, is unlikely to have apatite-based fertilizer applied to the soil.  American tobacco farmers love their special fertilizer, and American cigarette tobacco tastes “sweeter” because of it.  Add in many decades of accumulated radiation in the soil and you’ve got a product that’s very unique in mankind’s history.  Ol’ George didn’t smoke that stuff.

Every year, nearly a half-million people in the U.S. die from smoking. On average, that’s about 10,000 people from each state. About 1.2 million die annually in Europe (and their package warning labels put ours to shame. Canada has strong anti-smoking labels with graphic photos.) Worldwide, smoking causes one death every 8 seconds.

Smoking-induced diseases like cancer, heart disease, emphysema, stroke, etc., kill more people than the next 6 causes — alcohol, cars, suicide, AIDS, homicide, and illegal drugs — combined.

And I was just joking about, “Don’t tell anyone.”

Tell everybody. Cigarette smoke is radioactive, and that’s what does the damage.

So, why haven’t you heard this anywhere else?  There are two schools of thought . . .

First is that if people found out that low levels of radioactivity were harmful, they’d get upset about nuclear power plants.  The distinction about “radioactive particles selectively bombarding internal organs” compared with “random rays hitting dead skin that soon sloughs off” would be difficult to pack into a 30-second commercial.  Nuclear power plants would get a bad name, even though their emissions are actually much lower than those from a cigarette and a different kind of radioactivity.  That’s right; you get far more radiation (and a much worse kind) from smoking than you would living downwind from a nuclear power plant, and it lands and sticks in a much worse place in your body.

The second idea is that the tobacco companies have an awful lot of money, are not known for playing fair or telling the truth, and wouldn’t hesitate to squash anyone like a bug if they tried to bring them down.

Pick one.

Charlie Gosh

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