Dengue Fever Remedy

Hydrotherapy cures Dengue in just three days.

Chikungunya and dengue are just two of the diseases carried by this Asian Tiger Mosquito. And it is coming to Australia! If you want to start to feel really uncomfortable read (or listen) to ""Dengue Epidemic" replayed this month on ABC Radio National. This little mossie is called the "barbecue stopper" because of their nasty sting. Even their name, Aedes, means "unpleasant".

The good news, after listening to that programme is that hydrotherapy treatments are effective for most fevers, I have had most experience with Dengue, but have treated glandular fever and childhood fevers.

The first important point about treating fevers with hydrotherapy is to begin as soon as the fever is detected. It doesn't matter what actually causes the fever, hydrotherapy is effective for most. An early start means that the disease is resolved more quickly, decreasing the chance of the serious complications like cerebral malaria and haemorrhagic dengue. Patients also miss out on those non-fatal but painful bone and joint pains in dengue and chikungunya.

Second, work out which sort of fever it is. In dengue (and all the other diseases mentioned in this post) it is commonly a Retention Fever with cold skin, shivering, goose bumps and chilly sensations.

Treatment is similar to my previous post on Malaria. That is, a Sweating Treatment followed by a Graduated Tonic Cold, daily for three days.

In practice this is the regime we used for dengue:
Russian Bath for 20 minutes, until sweating profusely, followed by Cold Mitten Friction, daily for three days. We never needed a fourth treatment as all the people we treated had recovered enough to leave hospital without any weakness or tiredness. This compares to the usual ten days in hospital followed by weeks of lethargy. Kellogg recommends using the Cholera treatment while febrile, which is a Hot Blanket Pack then Cold Mitten Friction.

For Glandular Fever I used a Hot Tub Bath until sweating, followed by a Cold Shower. Once again this was daily for three days when the patient was fully recovered and returned to work.

However you can use whatever Sweating Treatment is handy for you. The Sweating Pack is very good and Cold Pours are easily done after Packs and Tub Baths.

One reason that these treatments are so effective is that they really boost the immune system. The white cell count is often trebled by the third day. This was confusing for our referring doctors initially, as they thought the patients were developing another infection, when the patients were feeling quite well and eager to leave hospital.

Another important benefit of treating fevers with hydrotherapy is that the patient doesn't have to expend the huge amount of energy required to produce the fever needed to respond to the disease.

It is a surprise to most people that fevers are a good thing (as long as they don't get too high). Fevers are the front line of the immune response to infection and the hydrotherapy treatments listed here push heat into the body, assisting the rise in body temperature without the body having to work so hard. This is why there is less weakness or prostration after a fever treated with hydrotherapy.

I would love to hear of your experience with fevers so please leave a comment.

Morning Sickness Remedy

Heating Trunk Packs relieve nausea and pain during pregnancy.

More than half of all pregnant women suffer from morning sickness but the treatment typically aims "to lessen the symptoms of nausea, rather than attacking the root cause(s) of the nausea" (Wikipedia). This usually means that a mother suffers weeks of discomfort, and sometimes distress, during pregnancy. This can be avoided with hydrotherapy.

Dr Abbott, when talking about severe morning sickness (hyperemesis gravidarum), said the Hot and Cold Abdominal Pack is an "almost never-failing remedy".

When she is pregnant my wife has relatively mild morning sickness and used hydrotherapy in her last two pregnancies. One treatment would relieve morning sickness for about two weeks when it would be repeated with similar effects. She has used it on other women with similar results. All of the cases I am aware of were not severe, but they uniformly had relief.

For use at home, the Heating Trunk Pack is the safest and easiest. Because it seems a little complex to the beginner, I wrote up the full procedure. Kellogg says the cause of morning sickness is Celiac Congestion and so the treatments are all Vascular Antiphlogistics any of which would probably work so if you want to modify things then go ahead.

Please leave a comment if this treatment helps you, or someone you love, enjoy their pregnancy without the effects of nausea.

Malaria Treatment

A friend on the western border of Thailand sent me a email asking about treating malaria with hydrotherapy.

This makes sense because a lot of the malaria in this area is resistant to preventives and can lead to cerebral malaria, which if it doesn't kill, often leaves the person with major brain damage. I know this because I taught hydrotherapy up on the Burma border about 20 years ago and saw the results of malarial infection.

The Traditional Hydrotherapy page on Malaria lists a lot of treatment methods but basically it is a heating treatment until the patient starts sweating and then a Graduated Tonic Cold which is a short cold treatment. Then the patient is wrapped up warmly to sleep and for other treatments.

As with all treatment, the sooner it is started, the better. One of hydro's great advantages is that it doesn't interfere with other treatment and even if we have misdiagnosed, it won't cause any damaging side effects in most cases.

So... if it looks like it may be malaria, start treating it straight away before the patient gets weak.

On days 1,2 and 3 do something to get the patient sweating (but make sure they have a Cooling Compress on their head). The hill tribe people I worked with wrapped a patient in black polythene plastic out in the sunshine, to achieve sweating.

Once sweating started do a quick cold treatment. The tribe's people would quickly dunk them in the very cold river.

They are kept warm between treatments.

The principles are much the same for all fevers.
If you have experience at treating malaria successfully with hydrotherapy, please contact me.

Traditional Hydrotherapy is Online!

This is really a big day. At long, long last the website is now live.

It has taken exactly a year from when I decided to get serious about turning Traditional Hydrotherapy from a dinky DOS programme into a stunning (hyperbole) website. And 19 years after I started going through the original books and putting them on HyperHelper.

Admittedly the content is still the same, it just looks a whole lot more attractive. It is easier to use with redundant cards combined and plenty of indexes and navigation added.

Please visit Traditional Hydrotherapy and tell me if you find mistakes. There must be some!

I'm not sure when the Google Search function will begin working. Google has to index the site first. Apart from that it looks good to me.

For those of you who can actually use the information on the site, I would love you to tell me how it goes. If I get enough feedback I will start a forum where you can add to the knowledge base of currently used and successful (or unsuccessful) hydrotherapy.

Big sigh of relief... and prayer of thanks to God.

What am I going to do now? Maybe get some more sleep... or relaxation? Software Freedom Day next weekend so that's next Sunday out.

Vim Makes a Sitemap File

This is probably the last tech (Vim) post I will be making as Traditional Hydrotherapy is online.

To try to jump start Google into indexing the site, I made a sitemap.xml file manually. I'm not sure if it will work, but I submitted it to Google anyway.

The instructions were quite clear from Manually Creating Sitemap Files, but how to achieve it quickly with Vim and over 900 files to index?

I used Split Screens, Reading-in files and, of course a repeating Macro.

I started by manually doing my home directory and making sure the parts worked. This was the longest part of the process and involved making some files (to read in) and the macro.

I had to produce code like this for each file:

<url>
<loc>http://www.traditionalhydrotherapy.com/Problems/VisceralCongestion.html</loc>
<lastmod>2010-08-17</lastmod>
</url>

I first made two files "top.n" and "end.n" to get the beginning and end of the url block
This is top.n:

<url>
<loc>http://www.traditionalhydrotherapy.com/Problems/

This is what end.n looked like:

</loc>
<lastmod>2010-08-17</lastmod>
</url>

Then I opened "sitemap.xml" in the hydro home directory (where the file would end up) and split the screen to "Problems/PageIndex.html" (using :sp Problems/PageIndex.html). PageIndex consist of an alphabetical list of all the pages in the directory, in this case the Problems directory.

I had to get the cursor in the right place in both files so moving to the line above the first file in the PageIndex list I then used Ctrl-W-P to move back the sitemap file then "G" to take me to the end of the file and ran this macro:

:read top.n^MG$^Wpj0f"lyt"^Wpp:read end.n^MkJxG$

:read top.n^M I read-in the contents of the top.n file (^M represents the single character for Enter, don't try to copy this file as I've escaped all the special characters - better to make your own keyboard macro)

G$^Wpj0 - move the cursor to the end of the sitemap file and Ctrl-W-p (CTRL is ^W) to take me to the PageIndex file and then move down one line and to the beggining of the line.
f"lyt" - find the first quote on the line, move one character to the right and yank to the next quote (this simply copies the url of the file from the link).
^Wpp - Ctrl-W-p back to the sitemap file and put the yanked text (the url)
:read end.n^M - read in the contents of end.n
kJx - move up one line and join the next line, deleting the space.
G$ - move the cursor to the end of the file and end of the line, ready for the next itineration of the macro.

Of course the this macro was repeatable so I just typed:

300@a

and it simply itinerated down the list 300 times. (the macro was in the "a" register)
When it got to the "</ul>" at the end of the list of files, it just stopped the macro as there was no " on the line.

I had to modify top.n and end.n for each of the four sections (Diseases, Effects, Problems, and Techniques) but otherwise it was quite quick.

I indexed 955 files in all.

The last bits were easy, I just added the xml header and footer and the file was complete.

Originally it was over 130 kb so I turned it into a 7kb .gz (sitemap.xml.gz) and ftp'd it to the site. Then I used Google Webmaster tools to submit it to Google.

Done. I think.

Vim wnext, and Macros for Multiple Files

I have finished the pages for the home section. Yipee!, praise God! Almost done.
But while I did these pages I found a few things I needed to change on all the other cards. The first two were warnings from the validator:

1. My XHTML namespace declaration was invalid because I hadn't stated which language I was using. I needed to delete the whole line and insert a declaration that included xml:lang to denote the primary language of the page.
   
2. Most of the tooltips had a space at the end of the title's value, just before the closing quote. I needed to delete them all.
   
3. I needed to add a copyright notice on every page.
   

This meant at least two changes on every one of 988 files.... but thanks to Vim the whole thing took under an hour.

First I made two files and put them in the home directory:

lang.txt was

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

And copy.txt:

<p>© Copyright 2010 Bruce Thompson</p>

Then I moved into a section (eg. Diseases with 202 pages) and in the console:

gvim *.html

This started Vim editing all 202 html files in the directory and displayed the first file. I then recorded the following macro "@A":

/<html xml^Mddk:read ../lang.txt^MG?div^Mk:read ../copy.txt^M:%s/ ">/">/ge^M

/<html xml^Mdd Find the present namespace declaration (^M is Enter - didn't type it, just pressed Enter) and delete the line
k:read ../lang.txt^M - Move up one line and read the lang.txt file
G?div^M - Move to the end of the file and search backwards for the last closing div
k:read ../copy.txt^M - Move up a line (to where the copyright needed to be) and read in the copy.txt file.
:%s/ ">/">/ge^M - Substitute the attribute ending with the space for one without a space. The "g" flag means that it will substitute all the occurrences on the line but the "e" flag is essential in a multifile macro because this doesn't report an error when there is no occurence in a particular file (and therefore stop the macro repeating).

After I checked the file and validated it. I made a new macro "@B":

:wnext^M/<html xml^Mddk:read ../lang.txt^MG?div^Mk:read ../copy.txt^M:%s/ ">/">/ge^M

:wnext - Wrote the file and moved to the next file in the series then repeated what I had done in previous macro, "@A".

When this file validated correctly, I issued the following command

:200@b

This repeated the "@b" macro on the remaining 200 files in the directory.

I repeated this for each of the remaining three sections and had it all done in under an hour. So it is now finished... I've only got to find a place to host it.

Vim Pagemaking Macro

Today is a high day. I finished making content pages (all the Hydrotherapy stuff) at 2.30 this afternoon. I wondered if it would ever end.
The numbers breakdown is:
Diseases: 202
Effects: 54
Problems: 437
Techniques: 295
Making a grand total of 988 pages.

The Vim pagemaker macro I used was:

/#card^Mf<"ly2f>:sp PageIndex.html^MG$o^[p:wq^Mj^"ty$j"fy$:sp ^Rf^M:read top.h^MG$"tp:read head.h^MkJxG$:read cont.h^MG$:read breadcrumb.h^Mj/<\/p>^Mh"tpG$"tpa</h1>^[^Wwjma/#end^Mkd'a^WWpG$:read rightbox.h^MG$:read badge.h^MG$:read bottom1.h^MG$:read col1.h^MG$:read bottom2.h^MG$:read col2.h^MG$:read bottom3.h^MG$:read col3.h^M/^Rf^M^faa class="here"^[G$:read footer.h^MG:w^M

To tease it out a bit we need to remember that the first three lines of the card "Visceral Congestion" were:

#card @<a href="VisceralCongestion.html">Visceral Congestion</a>
Visceral Congestion
VisceralCongestion.html

And we need to know that:
"l = register L etc
^M = Enter
^[ = Escape
^W = Ctrl-W (for window navigation with a split screen)
^R = Ctrl-R (reads in the contents of following register)

The macro would start with the cursor in the previous card so:

/#card^Mf<"ly2f>:sp PageIndex.html^MG$o^[p:wq^M

will find the first line of the card, yank the link, <a href="VisceralCongestion.html">Visceral Congestion</a>, to Register L (Link) and append this link to the end of the Page Index file.

j^"ty$j"fy$:sp ^Rf^M

Then moving down to the second line (Visceral Congestion) then yanks it to Register T (Title). Then it moves down to the third line (VisceralCongestion.html), appends it to Register F (Filename) and splits to a window editing the file, VisceralCongestion.html.

:read top.h^MG$"tp:read head.h^MkJxG$:read cont.h^MG$

This starts the Visceral Congestion.html with the DTD and other HTML down to the <title> tag by "reading" in the contents of a file I had previously made called "head.h". It then puts the contents of Register T (Visceral Congestion) and moves to the end of the file (with G$) before reading in the contents of the file "cont.h" which takes us down to the top of the content of the file.

:read breadcrumb.h^Mj/<\/p>^Mh"tpG$"tpa</h1>^[

This reads in the breadcrumb navigation, which I made at the beginning of each section, and places the title at the end then completes the heading of page by placing the title in h1 tags.

^Wwjma/#end^Mkd'a^WWpG$

Using window navigation we return to the lower window containing the contents of the card, places Mark A (ma) on the first line of the file (just below the filename and searches for the end of the card. It then deletes the card's contents, navigates up a window puts the contents then moves to the end of the file.

:read rightbox.h^MG$:read badge.h^MG$:read bottom1.h^MG$:read col1.h^MG$:read bottom2.h^MG$:read col2.h^MG$:read bottom3.h^MG$:read col3.h^M

A long list of file with various HTML are read in at the end of the file, the last ones containing the site map at the bottom of the page. The "col" files had the contents of the map.

/^Rf^M^faa class="here"^[G$:read footer.h^MG:w^M

Once the contents of the site map were read in, the page's title needed highlighting with the class "here" and the footer file finished off the page.

I then opened the page in Firefox, corrected any obvious problems then validated it with Total Validator (6.3.0) as desktop tool.

Total Validator was great with British English spellchecking and accessibility validation as well as the expected HTML validation.

The whole process for one page without major problems took only a minute.

But now it's finished. Just the main index page and the messy stuff up the top of the site to write now.