Coffee grounds stop bleeding
Q. I have enjoyed reading about home remedies on your Web site and would like to share mine. Dip a bleeding (cut, nicked, sliced or whatever) finger in ground coffee and the bleeding stops. If, after the first dip, it still shows some blood, dip it in again and bandage it.
A Lebanese friend told me that it is used all the time in his home. Maybe it’s the caffeine. Regardless, it has always worked for me.
A. Thanks for surprising us with a brand-new home remedy for minor cuts. We have collected several others, including ground black pepper, cayenne pepper and ground sage.
Q. I have bad leg cramps that wake me early in the morning. I read that a bar of soap placed between the sheets might help.
Where precisely do you place it? I can’t take quinine because it interacts with the tamoxifen I take to prevent a recurrence of breast cancer. The cramps are really painful.
A. Quinine is no longer available as a treatment for leg cramps, even if you weren’t on tamoxifen. The Food and Drug Administration banned its use for cramps a few years ago.
Although we are hard-pressed to explain why soap under the bottom sheet would be helpful against leg cramps, many readers insist that it works. Here is just one example:
“I have been keeping a bar of soap under my sheet for quite some time. It does work, but I was never sure it did.
“Last night I had toe cramps. Instead of getting up to walk them off, I curled my foot as close to the soap as possible. The cramps went away in about five seconds.
“At the same time the calf in my other leg cramped. Again I moved the soap around near my leg, and the cramp was gone. Weird? You bet. Would I change this? No way. Who knows how this works, but it does.”
Not everybody benefits from the soap trick. Others report success with yellow mustard, pickle juice or magnesium. For more details on soap and all these remedies, we are sending you our Guide to Leg Pain. Anyone who would like a copy, please send $2 in check or money order with a long (No. 10), stamped (59 cents), self-addressed envelope to: Graedons’ People’s Pharmacy, No. RLS-5, P.O. Box 52027, Durham, NC 27717-2027. It also can be downloaded for $2 from our Web site: www.peoplespharmacy.com.
Q. I’ve always had low cholesterol, but it has been rising for the past few years. First it went from 180 to 233, and then to 363.
I tried to figure out what might be responsible and realized I had started taking glucosamine and chondroitin for sore knee joints in 2005. I thought perhaps that might have triggered the problem.
My doctor is skeptical, and he would like me to take Crestor to lower my cholesterol. In the meantime, I have stopped the supplement. My knees hurt again, but soon I will have my cholesterol tested to see if it has come down.
A. Studies have not shown that glucosamine and chondroitin are effective for relieving mild to moderate arthritis pain (Arthritis and Rheumatism, October 2008). Nonetheless, many people take it and report benefit.
No studies have proven that glucosamine raises cholesterol, though many readers do report such an association. The dietary supplement does appear to increase insulin resistance, however, and could make treatment of type 2 diabetes more difficult (American Journal of the Medical Sciences, June 2007).