This month, rather than writing about some fascinating health topic, I thought to give you an example from my practice. A 69 year old, wheelchair-bound lady with myasthenia gravis and diabetes mellitus developed an abscess on her bottom. This got badly infected so she was put on a series of antibiotics and was visited daily-weekly by the dressing nurse. In the elderly, many of such ulcerations never leave the dressing nurse’s list. Ulcers need maintenance care with cleaning and dressing, and swabs, lab analyses, antibiotics when infection occurs. In this case the ulcer was 2 ¾ inch deep and 3 inches wide and caused a great deal of discomfort. As her ulcer didn’t heal, I was asked for further help. My approach was “actively increase the chance of spontaneous remission” so I advised her to take Aloeride® at 2 capsules a day and take dehydrated raw vegetable and ripe fruit powder at 4 capsules a day. We are now 4 months further from that prescription and the ulcer is almost healed, there is a mere pinpoint left to close and all the pain has gone. The dressing nurse, who has decades of experience, said that she has never seen this kind of ulcer heal this quickly.
The most important thing to remember is that wound healing must happen from the inside out. In this respect oral, systemic supplementation is much safer than topically encouraging fibroblast activity which risks healing-over whilst underneath there still is a wound. Aloeride® provides the best aloe vera can offer which includes wound healing, numerous good studies have shown this (www.aloeride.co.uk/acatalog/research.html). In as much that Aloeride® stimulates the knitting, local nutrition is the wool. So when healing clearly doesn’t occur on its own, it makes perfect sense to improve nutrition and blood flow. In this particular case the diabetes needed to be stabilised too. From my article on juicing www.aloeride.co.uk/juicing.html, which was published in Woman’s Weekly and Yoga & Health, you will know that I am keen on natural supplementation so I use dehydrated veg/fruit/berries juice to bridge a nutritional gap. Why use juicing and Aloeride® together? Because this was an ‘all hands on deck’ situation and even with the two in tandem the ulcer took 4 months to heal. In this case the blood flow into the area was fine but in leg ulcers, circulation can/should be improved by Kneipp baths. If there is any danger of septicaemia then the dressing nurse will advise appropriately.
Kneipp baths are done to improve the local circulation and can prove very useful prior to active, mobilising exercises. Temperatures vary between approximately 10 und 38°C but frankly, if you can stand it, then go as cold and as (pleasantly!) hot as you can stand it. Do NOT scald yourself. You may wish to top up the bowl of warm water with boiling water so as to keep its temperature up and you may wish to drop ice cubes in the cold bowl. Alternate between the warm bath (for < 5 minutes) and the cold bath (for < 1 minute) and always end with the warm dip.
The combination of Aloeride® and veg/fruit/berries juice powder also is used by many people with Ulcerative Colitis. Nutrient uptake is a well known problem in IBD and interestingly enough, the fibre that normally can aggravate seems no issue when the vegetables and fruit are presented in powder form. Because Aloeride® and juice powder work systemically, they will affect the whole of the body and therefore can be as effective for a leg ulcer as for this lady’s abscess and in many cases be useful in UC too.
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A cordial welcome to our July 2006 Newsletter, it has been a workload-caused long gap since the last letter in March. This month’s main story is one from the practice. The author Han van de Braak works as a Chartered Physiotherapist, Registered Acupuncturist and Naturopath in an Integrated Medicine Practice in England.
In cooking you can do different things with egg yoke to what you can do with egg white. In contrast, frying an egg ‘sunny side up’ processes the yoke and white indiscriminately. 
