My wife and I recycle nearly everything: cans, glass, aluminum, plastic, and paper/cardboard. We have a huge compost pile for leaves, backyard trimmings, twigs, and pino needles. Of course it is highly-enriched when we clean the chicken coop.

Nosotros are on well water and fortunately, our deep well produces an adequate amount of cold, fresh, and untreated water. My but guilt is that I beloved ice-common cold bottled water in those plastic bottles. I notice them perfect to partially freeze and observe them user-friendly when traveling. Since my bout with kidney stones, I am forced to drinkable a gallon or so of water per mean solar day. Working outside, I notice it easier to grab a few common cold bottles from the refrigerator and bring them with me to the garden.  I tin't drink out of the hose, since this is untreated, irrigation water.

Nosotros don't throw abroad the plastic water bottles. I envision a time when I will refill them from our well water (assuming they are non dirty), and just apply them over and over. At this fourth dimension, most of these bottles just go in the plastic recycling bins.

Nosotros had a crew of tree-trimmers at our home recently, removing the mistletoe that was slowly killing the oaks, and a few precarious, oak branches that, if they snap, would surely kill me. These guys utilize recycled gallon milk bottles for their water, which became warm to hot from sitting outside all solar day. Unless I was dying of thirst, my choice would not be to drink warm h2o. As a child in Pennsylvania, we would walk miles to a spring that was bubbling out of the footing. This h2o was soooooo common cold that your hands would freeze when you lot loving cup them together to beverage your fill. If I had a cold spring on my properly, I would never move.

I have a lot of asthmatic patients — mostly children. In order for kids to use a hand-held MDI (multi-dose inhaler) for albuterol or inhaled corticosteroids, they must have a spacer — a chamber-similar device where the medicine is sprays, and the child tin can hands inhale information technology without having the coordination to time their inhalations with the spray.

Nigh insurance companies volition pay for asthma medications, merely a surprising number of them will not pay for a medical spacer. These can cost $30 or more, depending on the type. Someone without health insurance (many), or those with really crappy insurance (near of us), may not have the extra income to purchase the least-expensive spacer. What happens is that they effort administering the medication without it. Inhaled asthma medications are not effective if they don't make information technology to your lungs. When I enquire parents to demonstrate how their children are using the inhaler, I finally empathise why they are not improving. The kids are just getting the medicine in their mouths, not their lungs.

I take a cleverly-subconscious hoard of pharmaceutical company supplied spacers that I give out for free for families who do non have the resources to buy them. In the jump, when allergies are the highest, my supply runs out quickly. Either that, or my married woman who uses my office on my twenty-four hour period off, has institute my stash.

Years ago, I would cover the individual practice of an elderly doc and so that they could get a little vacation. They were nearly 90 years former and all the same practicing. They would have their asthma patients salve the empty toilet paper tubes to use equally an inhaler. They would piece of work for a time, but since they were made of paper, they would curve, vesture out, or be discarded if seen lying around. This gave me an thought.

nebulizer1_moserEvery year or and so, our state medical briefing holds a contest called "2 Minutes; Ii Slides, Two Questions" where the participants are limited to a 2-minute lecture, using only two PowerPoint slides, and respond only ii questions at the end.  I have won for virtually iii years in a row. I would like to share one of my entries with you: The Water Canteen Spacer.

Supplies Needed:

  • Discarded, but clean, pocket-size plastic water canteen
  • Roll of duct tape
  • Abrupt knife

Steps:

one. Advisedly cut the bottom off of the water bottle, besides equally part of the mouth piece.
two. Using strips of duct tape, cover the abrupt edges where y'all have cut
3. Take more duct tape and create a smaller opening at the mouth finish — an opening or fifty-fifty a slit that volition temporarily and snugly fit the inhaler. If you accept an old nebulizer mask, yous can adhere this with duct tape instead.
four. Concord the bottom end around the mouth (or over the mouth and nose); spray the proper dose of the asthma medication, and just inhale. The bottle may fifty-fifty collapse a scrap confirming a proper inhalation.

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For this entry, I won a $50 gift certificate at a volume store, and upset another clinician who challenged my personal environmental for using plastic water bottles in the first-place. Their entry lost; they were just a sore loser.

Photos: Rod Moser