health care on the cheap

Factual Questions
1

No, I’m not planning on trying any of this at home, but I’m curious…

A friend of mine told me a story once about another friend of his who, instead swallowing aspirin for a headache, crushed some aspirin tablets, dissolved them in water, and injected the solution straight into his vein. Now, I’m not completely sure this actually happened, but I can’t think of a reason it wouldn’t work.

On a slightly different note, instead of boiling water to sterilize it, could you instead add some (very small) amount of chlorine bleach to it? A couple of drops to the gallon, perhaps?

2

  1. Why? I just did the math, which makes me assume that the tablets are probably pretty pure, but I’d rather run them through my GI tract to be safe. IIRC, aspirin doesn’t dissolve all that easily; add to that, the solution might burn.

  2. Back when I was a kid, the tap water in Houston would have a chlorine smell at times. My copy of The People’s Guide to Mexico is busy paving my bedroom floor somewhere, but I recall that they recommend using a small amount of bleach to purify suspect water if you can’t find iodine. I don’t know the amount to add though, and it will smell. Maybe someone else can follow up on this.

3

Well, I certianly wouldn’t try a homemade solution, but I was given an aspirin injection in a hospital in Germany once.

It didn’t burn, as I recall, nor was it any more effective than the oral kind.

4

On a trip I just took to Mexico we used water with a small amount of bleach in it for sterilizing dishes and washing our hands before handling food. we didn’t drink it but I’m sure you could in a pinch.