All Posts Tagged With: "different kinds"
Are we an overly medicated society?
Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Fri, Sep 18 2009 | 0 Comments
When I woke up this morning, I wondered if, as a society, we are overly medicated. I wondered because I woke up with an awful sinus headache, the kind I cannot shake unless I take a couple ibuprofen and an allergy pill (my choice today was Allegra).
It can be argued that modern medicine has led to great things such as people living to be 90 and older which was once simply unheard of also, children being able to fight off cancer (which was also unheard of). It can also be argued that modern medicine has led to the failure of natural selection.
It just seems like, overall, we have a pill for everything. If you watch the national news in the evening, it is very obvious that there are too many medications. There are so many that they have started to combine medicines. If you look, there are at least a dozen different kinds of drugs for something as common as heartburn.
When is the last time you walked into the drugstore and actually looked at all the different pain relief medicines? How about allergy medications? After Chris caught a cold last week, I literally spend half an hour looking at different cold remedies when I just gave up and bought DayQuil.
Pharmaceuticals is a HUGE business. Just look at this list. It’s outrageous when you start to look at all the money we spend yearly on medication. I don’t believe that we’ll all be walking around in a drug induced stupor anytime soon, but maybe we shouldn’t run to the medicine cabinet whenever something hurts or we should start looking for more natural remedies for common problems like headaches, allergies, and upset stomachs.
Again, this is all just something I was thinking about this morning when I woke up. It is a little bit of a scatterbrained idea, but when I realized I was fumbling around for the same drugs I run to every time I get a sinus headache I stopped and thought about my mindless actions.
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Tags: outrage, Money, investor
Frugal Living: Living without Air Conditioning in the Summer?
Lizzie Tyner | RSS | Sat, Jun 06 2009 | 8 Comments
I recently read an article about saving money during the summer by not running your air conditioner. While I will probably not even try this one, I wanted to share it with some of you guys to see if any of you are brave enough to try it.
The story from the article is that the author hadn’t used the air conditioner in two summers and it was fairly easy to adjust to the change.
The tips are to turn off the a/c (obviously), when you’re spending time outdoors, you are doing so in the shade, do not even turn on the air conditioner in the car, and avoid places that have air conditioners so that you won’t throw off all the adjusting your body has done. The author says that your body will adjust to a certain level of heat and will do whatever it can to keep you cooled as long as you’re drinking plenty of liquids and doing other things to keep yourself cool.
Stay indoors during the hottest part of the day, but stay outside in the shade is one of the tips I didn’t understand at first, then the article went on to say that there are ways to keep your house cooler in the daytime as long as certain measures are taken at night to help your house out the next day. The author suggests getting up in the morning and closing all the windows and doors and to cover them with a heavy shade or black out drape.
Another tip to keeping the house cool is to use less electricity from inside appliances as possible. I will say, in the summer I try to do laundry at night and use a toaster oven to cook when I can to help keep the house cool. This author goes as far as to say don’t dry your clothes in the dryer at all, cook outside on the grill, and use ceiling fans in a counter clockwise direction.
At the end of the day, open all the windows to let in cooler air. I would have a serious problem doing this. Where I live, there are too many different kinds of bugs that can get into my house from the windows, even the windows with screens on them.
The author of the article claims that they were able to save between $60 and $150 a month on their electric bill. Like I said, that is a big reduction in the cost of electricity, but I don’t personally think I could do it for an entire summer. Good luck to anyone that may want to try though!
Related posts:Frugal living tip 2: Coupon clipping is for everyone
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Tags: toaster oven, windows and doors, screens
