Shingles Support Site

admin answers:

Shingles (herpes zoster) is a viral infection of the nerve roots. It causes pain and often causes a rash on one side of the body, the left or right. The rash appears in a band, a strip, or a small area. Shingles is most common in older adults and people who have weak immune systems because of stress, injury, certain medicines, or other reasons. Most people who get shingles will get better and will not get it again.Shingles occurs when the virus that causes chickenpox starts up again in your body. After you get better from chickenpox, the virus ”sleeps” (is dormant) in your nerve roots. In some people, it stays dormant forever. In others, the virus “wakes up” when disease, stress, or aging weakens the immune system. It is not clear why this happens. But after the virus becomes active again, it can only cause shingles, not chickenpox.

You can’t catch shingles from someone else who has shingles.There is no cure for shingles, but treatment may help you get well sooner and prevent other problems. Call your doctor as soon as you think you may have shingles. The sooner you start treatment, the better it works. Treatment may include:

* Antiviral medicines, sometimes given with steroid medicines, to help you get well sooner and feel less pain.
* Medicines to help long-term pain. These include antidepressants, pain medicines, and skin creams.

Good home care can help you feel better faster. Take care of any skin sores, and keep them clean. Take your medicines as directed. And use over-the-counter pain medicines to relieve pain.

Avoid contact with people until the rash heals. While you have shingles, you can spread chickenpox to people who have never had chickenpox. Be extra careful to avoid people with weak immune systems and pregnant women and babies who have never had chickenpox.

admin answers:

Yes i took about two days off work before the blisters started popping, it was so painful. Got was laid off at the time and honestly thankful because i dont think i could have gone back to work. The dr told me it takes from 6 to 8 weeks to heal.. But it took me 4 weeks for the severe pain to go away. The dr gave me valtrex and it helped my system in clearing it faster. I dont know if it affects animals but the dr told me u can give kids chicken pox. The dr also told me that is due to stress and that i will have it for the rest of my life. I pray GOd heals me bc im do not want to suffer in pain forever. My dr told me i can use a home remedy ; to mix salt with hot water and put it on the affected area with a small towel dip in the water to cool down the pain.. As hot as u can take it.. It was also help the blisters heal faster. Good luck and pray ….

admin answers:

Shingles is a mutated virus from the chickenpox virus. Once you catch a virus, you can never get rid of it. A virus, unlike a bacteria, is smaller than the size of the hole in a cell wall so it hides inside the cell attaching itself to the cell wall and goes dormant. There it forms a hard shell around itself for protection and starts mutating into a slightly different virus whereby it waits until your body becomes weak or stressed and then comes out as a new form of that older virus. Nevertheless, if you haven’t previously had chickenpox, you can catch it from somebody who has shingles.

Garlic is effective and works great against viruses but it works best if you catch the virus in its earliest stages. The first symptoms of a virus are usually headaches so start taking a large clove of garlic in juice with a banana mixed up in a blender three times a day at the first sign of a virus headache.

Exercise is also effective against viruses as it strengthens the immune system. Deep breathing exercises are important to keep moisture out of your lungs so you won’t come down with pneumonia. Inhaling deeply through your nose and exhaliing through your mouth while you exercise will keep the moisture out of your lungs. If you don’t have moisture in your lungs, you can’t get pneumonia. 70,000 people die needlessly each year in the US from complications of pneumonia because they fail to keep the moisture out of their lungs when they get sick from something else.

Flax seed and salmon are high in omega fatty acids which stimulate white blood cell production so that you will have more white blood cells to fight off a virus.

Garlic, omega fatty acids, and exercise work the best with viruses so keep exercising and be sure to do proper deep breathing to protect yourself from pneumonia.

admin answers:

If all you have for a roof sheathing is 20 year old 1/2″ plywood you need more than shingles…….like a new roof of at least 3/4 inch….the cracking in the shingles is from the old ply failing, sagging, moving around; nails pulling through, butt joints of two sheet edges on the rafters moving, etc etc etc.

admin answers:

There was an experiment done about the benefits of enzymes and raw food versus cooked food. This experiment was done by Dr. Francis Pottenger.
I also did a paper about raw and pasteurized milk and what i learned shocked and disappointed me. At the very least if i cannot get raw milk i will drink the organic pasterized milk.
I learned that milk is a good sorce of calcium but only if it is an organic form meaning in it’s natural state. When heat is applied to milk as in pastuerization it then becomes inorganic and the molecular structure has changed and it is not recognized by the body, so the body does not know what to do with it in this form. So in essence, milk that is pasteurized has most of the good stuff missing and destroyed before you drink it and whats even worse is that under the conditions that it is produced(hormones, mass production). This is about Dr. Francis Pottenger.
He was the original research physician in nutrition. In the early 1930’s, he conducted what was to become a famous study of cats. Here is one account of the results:

There’s one more study I want to bring to your attention and it’s called the Pottenger cats study and it lasted for ten years, with three generations of cats being studied. Approximately 900 cats were involved. Dr. Francis Pottenger took 2 sets of cats and fed them only raw milk and raw meat. He took 3 more sets of cats and fed them cooked meat and pasteurized milk. This study was specifically designed to show the difference between eating raw foods versus cooked and processed foods over a long period of time. The cats eating the raw food were disease free and healthy, generation after generation after generation. But, the cats eating the cooked and processed foods had different results. By the end of the 1st generation the cats started to develop degenerative diseases and became quite lazy. By the end of the 2nd generation the cats had developed degenerative diseases by mid-life and started losing their coordination. By the end of the 3rd generation the cats eating the cooked foods had developed degenerative diseases very early in life and some were born blind and weak and had a much shorter life span. Many of the third generation cats couldn’t even produce offspring.

This is from a Website whose name I appreciate: thehealthnuts.net. For a more detailed account of this experiment, visit the lifestar site.