Nurse Amy: You know it’s funny that you mention that, but Dr. Bones wrote a really nice article for SurvivalBlog last year, actually last July. I think it was July 28th. And it was all about shelf lives. So honey, why don’t you share some of that knowledge? He did intense research.
Dr. Bones: I wrote something called
A Doctor’s Thoughts on Antibiotics, Experation Dates and TEOTWAWKI. You can also look it up, I’ve written about it in all sorts of places.
Nurse Amy: He put it on our blog also.
Dr. Bones: Yeah, you can find it on our blog. You’ll find it in Dr. Prepper’s Family Preparedness Handbook, we wrote the medical chapter for that. You’ll find that also.
Nurse Amy: Well it’ll be coming out soon.
Dr. Bones: The 13th edition coming out. Basically, expiration dates are really a bunch of hooey. The truth of the matter is expiration dates are purely the date of which a company, a pharmaceutical company, will guarantee that their medicine is at 100% potency. Now that means that after an expiration date, there’s nothing that says that a medicine suddenly becomes harmful or that it’s suddenly ineffective 100 percent. And if these medicines are in pill or capsule form – pill or capsule form, this is important – you can expect them to last years and years beyond the expiration date. Even the U.S. government has decided that this is the case because they have put together a program called Shelf Life Extension Plan. And they’re doing this because they’ve accumulated so many of these medicines in FEMA, they’ve purchased so many of them, they’ve accumulated so many of them, they are becoming expired. And so they tested more than 30 or 40 medications, many of them antibiotic, and they found that these medicines were at full potency two to ten years after their expiration dates. And the ones that were two years after their expiration dates because they had only been expired for two years when they did the test. And so you can depend, especially if you store them correctly in a dry, cool, dark place, you can expect your antibiotics or other pill/capsule medications to last years beyond the expiration date. As a matter of fact, with Tamiflu the antiviral medication the U.S. government has officially put out a specific OK authorization for you to use Tamiflu for swine flu or other flu pandemics for up to five years after their expiration dates. And that’s the government hedging its bets, and still telling you to use it five years after its expiration date.
Nurse Amy: Now let’s be clear: This is not liquids. This is not insulin. This is not anything that’s been reconstituted like children’s medicines.
Dr. Bones: They don’t last long.
Nurse Amy: This is strictly powdered or capsules or pills.
Jack Spirko: Yeah, in fact I have the actual copy of the study that was sent to me by a listener, the Shelf Life Extension Program where the government basically said “We don’t want to throw all this stuff away.” Just a couple things cited in it: Atropine had an original shelf life of five years, the average shelf life they extended by is five years, ten years total with 100% efficacy. Diazepam, four year stated, five years with the extension program, nine years total shelf life extended. This was a study that was done by the government. I actually think that maybe I got the conspiracy hat on here, maybe it’s just hard to find for one reason or another, but I had Dr. Wilke on, who’s an emergency medical room physician. He’s been doing that for ten years and he cited this and he couldn’t get a copy of it anymore. I found all types of references to it on government websites, but I couldn’t get the actual document. Some listener somewhere tracked it down. So it’s almost like the pharmaceutical companies said “Hey guys, this is all cool and it’s all well that you guys are gonna do this, but we’d appreciate it if maybe you didn’t tell consumers this” or something. But I will publish a PDF of this in conjunction with this episode so people can take a look at it. I don’t know if you guys have that study.
Dr. Bones: Awesome. We don’t have the study because it was removed.
Jack Spirko: I shall send it to you.
Dr. Bones: I was an idiot for not printing it out when I saw it because the next week it was gone.
Nurse Amy: Right. He saw it the second week of July last year. And when he went to write it, like July 26th, 27th, it was gone. Well like you said, you have to have a special password to break in that section.
Dr. Bones: Yeah, you can get to it right now, but you need a special password.
Nurse Amy: Yeah, they want you to sign in and register, which of course they would not let us register.
Jack Spirko: Somebody needs to file a Freedom of Information on that thing because it’s a public study conducted with public dollars and there’s nothing that needs to protect national security there. So
I’ll make it available and they can tell me to take it down if they feel like it. We’ll see what happens there. So I’ll send it to you guys as soon as we get off the air today. When I couldn’t find it I was pretty angry about it. But I’ve come to determine what you’re saying is absolutely true, and it’s one I’ve always speculated about but never had any hard proof. My other thought was with these medications, they don’t become dangerous. They either work or work less. The effectiveness of them declines over time, so that’s not like I’m going to give it to you and now you’re going to die. It’s not like giving you an egg that’s twelve years old, then it’s disgusting and you’re going to get salmonella or whatever.
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Nurse Amy: Yeah, the only thing I want to mention about that is there’s a myth going around that’s still perpetuated on many, many different prepper websites. And that’s about tetracycline. And honey, why don’t you just mention what has changed about tetracycline that makes it not dangerous anymore? Because everyone will tell you, “Oh you have to throw your tetracycline away.” It’s not true anymore.
Dr. Bones: Yeah, the tetracycline was one of the very few medications that was in pill or capsule form years ago that would actually become toxic to your kidneys if you took it more than a year or so expired. But they changed the preparation now and this is no longer the case and although I don’t think tetracycline is at this point the best antibiotic, it’s not the first antibiotic you should have.
Nurse Amy: Generally it’s not the first one you should purchase. However if you have it and you purchased it in the past few years it’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to kill your kidneys.
Dr. Bones: By the way, the first one I think that people should have if they’re not allergic to penicillin is Amoxicillin, which is perfect for use in the Cellulitis or infected cuts and burns and things like that. Amoxicillin, it’s called Fish-Mox, F-I-S-H-hyphen-Mox in aquarium antibiotics. The 500mg dose I think is called Fish-Mox Forte, which is just the Latin word for strong. This is a good first antibiotic to have in place.
Jack Spirko: Little bit more on the tetracycline myth-busting thing too. Even if when it was technically dangerous, I did some research into it and I found out that there was exactly
one person that they could find that conclusively was made ill by expired tetracycline. One. Not ten, not eleven, one.
Nurse Amy: Right.
Dr. Bones: That’s all it takes, Jack.
Nurse Amy: If people don’t listen to anything else that we say during the show, if they can just get that in their heads that tetracycline isn’t going to kill you when passes expiration I will feel so happy. Another thing that I wanted to put on that list you were saying about what we should tell people to get is a suture kit. And I want to preface that with the fact that you should not be sewing up every laceration that occurs. You want to expand on that, honey?
Dr. Bones: Yeah, that’s true. It’s sort-of like the Shakespearian thing – To stitch or not to stitch, that is the question. You’ve got to determine how clean an injury is. Now for example, most gunshot wounds are not going to be clean wounds. They’re going to have pieces of your clothing, you’re going to have dirt. So you’re very rarely going to be stitching up a gunshot wound. Because all you’re going to do is you’re going to stitch in bacteria. And so it’s going to form a horrible infection, going to go right to your bloodstream, it’s going to kill you more than the bullet itself would.
Nurse Amy: Right. You’ll have more harm by walling up that bacteria into the wound.
Dr. Bones: Having said that, learning to suture is no big deal. And as a matter of fact, in the next issue of Survivalist I have an article on suturing and I think in the next one after that I’m going to do
a little lab on suturing with photographs and things. You get to see my pretty hands, but that’s about it. But I’ll want to do that because I really think the people should have at least a general idea of what is done to suture.
Jack Spirko: And you could practice this without cutting your friend open. You could go to an Asian market and get some skin-on pork. You can practice suturing that way.
Nurse Amy: That’s what we’ve done with our prepper group. We did a little workshop and we bought pig’s feet for everybody and bought some extra suturing kits and Dr. Bones actually taught a group of people how to suture, including some teenage girls. Who were really good, actually.
Dr. Bones: Sometimes a medic needs a medic.
Nurse Amy: I know. So the things to think about before you’re going to close up a wound. One, how dirty is it? How clean can you get it before you want to close it up? How old is it? If this wound is older than six hours, you already have bacteria that’s multiplying inside of that wound. Do not close it up because, again, you’re just walling it up. Size: If it’s longer than a quarter of an inch and it’s less than six hours and it’s not dirty then you can go ahead and leave it. Open if it’s less than and close it up if it’s more than. It also depends on where it is. If it’s on an elbow then it’s better to close it up; or a knee.
Dr. Bones: Over a joint, yeah.
Nurse Amy: Over a moveable joint.
Dr. Bones: All these things, by the way, all this information you can find at
doomandbloom.net. We have over a hundred articles on medical topics that would pertain to survival situations collapse situations. And really go over there. You’re going to see a lot of this stuff explained in much more detail.
Jack Spirko: Absolutely. And we’ll make sure we have links to all of your resources as well. I want to bust another myth today though. And it doesn’t sound like a medical topic but it is because it’s nutritional and I’ve got two medical professionals here to help me with it today. And as much as you guys get frustrated with the tetracycline one, this one has me want to rip my brain through my ears. Every. Single. Time. I talk about small livestock and we talk about rabbit, we have to have people freak out over rabbit starvation. Every single time. Now a couple things with this, and you tell me anywhere I got this wrong. My understanding of rabbit starvation is that people that lived up in the mountains and could get no other source of food whatsoever lived just off of rabbits, didn’t get enough fat, and could become ill and eventually even succumb to illness. But it’s not from the rabbit, the rabbit’s not poisoning you, it’s the lack of fat. When we grow rabbit livestock that rabbit has a hell of a lot more fat in its protein than a rabbit living off acorns in the middle of the mountain in the winter time. So there’s already more fat there. There’s also the fact that if we were living in a collapse situation, that was a primary source of protein, consuming things like the liver, the kidneys, et cetera would give us additional fat. But if we’re eating rabbit, even a lot, if we’re eating anything else, the average American is not going to go and be poisoned by rabbit by not getting enough fat. Because there’s plenty of fat in our diets right now.
Dr. Bones: Right, I agree with you 100 percent.
Nurse Amy: Oh, so do I.
Dr. Bones: Rabbit is such an excellent source of protein. And I really challenge any of your listeners or our listeners to find one food that handles everything. That gives you everything that you need. You have to have more than one item on your diet and maybe that’s what they’re talking about with regards to just eating rabbit. And I know about the rabbit starvation thing but I personally think that it’s so important to have a source of protein.
Nurse Amy: Right. These things are prolific, you can get I think it’s 300 pounds of rabbits starting with one – well obviously a couple.
Jack Spirko: Yeah, you gotta get two. <laughs> Amy, if you have a rabbit that reproduces by itself, I want like ten of them. The permanently fertilized – well Monsanto may give us that one day, the permanently fertilized female rabbit. Anyway, you guys have done a great job with that. I’d like to let people know, though, some of the other stuff you guys do. Because I want people to realize what a kindred spirit you guys are to the community here. Like Amy, you’re real big into gardening and you’re doing stuff with aquaculture now. Tell people about your Tilapia, because there’s another great source of protein and nutrition. And nutrition is important to us medically if we go into a collapse situation. Protein’s harder to replace because you can’t plant a protein seed in the ground and eat it. I guess a bean does that but not the way animal protein does. So what are you doing with these Tilapia?
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Nurse Amy: Well I built a couple years ago a pond, an above-ground pond next to my pool cause I was having my pool surface resurfaced and tiled and whatnot. So I said, “Well I have this empty corner over here, so I’ll build a pond.” So I kept some other fish in it. We raised Bettas and we had some goldfish and filled it up with water lilies, which are pretty. December we decided, “Let’s get into Tilapia. Let’s use that pond and raise some Tilapia.” So we ordered 23 purebred Blue Tilapia from a breeder.
Dr. Bones: Which are actually legal to possess in Florida. There are some times of Tilapia that are not.
Nurse Amy: Okay. So they’re legal, we don’t want to break any laws here. And I put them in the pond by themselves, I took everything else out. The liner decided to split a couple weeks ago and I had it made into a concrete pond. Well I had these fish in a 50 gallon – and when the liner busted a few of them died, I ended up with four. Well I turned around one day and this 50 gallon, and there’s about 200 Tilapia fry, which are babies, and now they stayed in the 50 gallon. I put the four remaining living adults back into my now-concrete pond. And they’ve reproduced again. They like warm water, so if you’re going to do aquaponics in a northern area, you need to keep them with a heater or in a climate-controlled, you know you see some of these places that raise Tilapia in greenhouses. But you gotta keep the water warm, they don’t produce any fry under 80 degrees. And they’ll eat just about anything. From greenery, duck weed, to any fish food you provide, we throw in there.
Dr. Bones: The awesome thing about Tilapia for us down here is that they’re an exotic species but they’re not an invasive species. So you’re not eating up the native fish. And it seems that the plants that they’re eating are actually seem to be the invasive plants in the area. So this is an excellent source of protein, they grow like crazy.
Nurse Amy: They grow really fast, they produce like crazy.
Dr. Bones: Right. And we had 200 babies and now we have 200 fingerlings. So they are hardy, they don’t die. They’re not fragile, that’s for sure.
Nurse Amy: Right. From four fish I now have another 400 fish.
Jack Spirko: And I can get people a way –you guys are in Florida, so you’ve got a really great climate for this. But people that live in a place where like, “Okay, the winter I’m going to have to eat them,” or whatever. If you have a pond you can grow these things in, in a single season they grow to plate size. So you could let them grow to plate size. And in the winter, you said you got a 50, 100 gallon tank inside the house, like a regular fish tank. Pick a few breeders, make sure you get some males and some females, bring them inside. And when the cold hits everything that’s big enough to plate, when the cold hits and basically freezes them, net them up, fillet them, freeze them, smoke them, do whatever and then put your breeders back in your pond. You can get a harvest every year. I’m putting in a greenhouse this fall and I just put in a pond. It’s going to hold about 5,000 gallons of water. And I’m really thinking this is an easier way than aquaponics. Because you just let the fish grow, feed them what they need and harvest them once a year. I don’t know if that’s going to work out but as I think about all the things of balancing an aquaponics system versus throwing them in their cement pond like the Beverly Hillbillies and just rock on, right?
Dr. Bones: Totally sustainable.
Nurse Amy: Yeah. Your considerations are filtration, because these things will, how do I say, pollute your water rapidly.
Jack Spirko: Lots of waste. Lots of waste.
Nurse Amy: You need a filtration system for ten times the size of the water you have. Biggest possible filtration you can unless you’re going to use plants that will help absorb the waste.
Dr. Bones: The waste, by the way, you can take some of that water with fish waste and put it in your garden and it will be an excellent source of nutrients.
Nurse Amy: Oh, fantastic. My plants are so happy. So a large filtration system. You need aeration, they need a lot of aeration. You need a lot of air stones. You need water movement, you don’t want stagnant water. So you need to put some pumps in the water on the bottom to circulate the water around.
Jack Spirko: In your particular pond how much water are you holding with your fish?
Nurse Amy: I have about five or six hundred gallons.
Jack Spirko: Okay.
Nurse Amy: It’s not your size.
Dr. Bones: It’s not like yours. You might have enough surface area to have good aeration naturally in your pond.
Jack Spirko: It all depends on the population too. The problem with bigger water is they make more Tilapia. But you know what, if you don’t get real attached to your babies Nurse Amy, you can net some and just throw them right into the garden beds and let them flop around ‘till they stop flipping. And there’s your nitrogen. So you can control populations. And if you have a pump that will pump from the bottom of your pond where all the waste goes, you pump that straight off. The Urban Farming Guys, what they’re going is a cyclone filter, which is like a three stage filter and the water just basically spins around real slowly in each chamber and most of that stuff settles out to the bottom of the cyclone filters and they just open it up and there’s your fertilizer. So there’s lots of ways to skin that cat. Tell us about some of the other things you guys are doing. You guys have a pretty extensive garden as well?
Nurse Amy: Yeah. I’ve been trying to plant a lot of perennials. So I’ve planted a Macadamia, a Cashew. I tried to get a lot of native plants so that I don’t have to worry about them so much. So we’re talking Muscadine grapes, Surinam cherries.
Dr. Bones: Sugarcane.
Nurse Amy: We have sugarcane, which is an unusual thing. We have bananas that are so easy, you just throw a banana plant around here and it just keeps going and going. I have artichokes, I have asparagus. I have pomegranates. And I have the big medicinal garden. We have different kinds of grapes but some of this is experimental too. You don’t know if you’re going to get something. I have very low chill apples called Dorset apples. Oranges. So anyway, the outside I’ve tried to build up perennials so it’s low maintenance but good production.
Dr. Bones: Inside we have cucumbers, melons.
Nurse Amy: Oh, I also have berries. Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, tayberries, and gooseberries.
Jack Spirko: How much land do you guys have?
Nurse Amy: Oh my gosh, we’re in a suburban neighborhood.
Dr. Bones: We’re in a half acre. We have it planted in such a fashion so that we get the maximum benefit from the smallest amount.
Nurse Amy: Permaculture.
Dr. Bones: And the bottom line is just don’t be chained to your lawn. Get rid of some of that grass.
Nurse Amy: Be willing to get rid of the grass. Oh I have coffee, I have tea. Coffee and tea.
Jack Spirko: Wow.
Dr. Bones: Now you have to remember Jack, that all of this-
Nurse Amy: Oh, star apple!
Dr. Bones: This is an experimental garden. Some of these things are going to take and some of them might not. But this is the time, before things go bad, for everyone to get through that learning curve, to find out what will grow. Find out what you’re good at growing and things like that. Get that garden growing. If you can get that garden growing now then you’re going to have a head start if a collapse occurs.
Nurse Amy: You’ve got to learn your lessons now. And basically what I would tell people: Don’t just think about doing the raised garden beds with your annuals. It’s a two-tier process. You’ve got to get in those perennials as fast as possible because some of them take a few years to give you good production and get them in now. My blackberry bushes cost me two dollars and 95 cents. Well I look in the grocery store and I see what a pint of blackberries are, if I can get one pint of blackberries I have just made back the cost of that plant. And I might get them for fifteen years.
<1:00:19>
Jack Spirko: Absolutely. You might get them for more than fifteen years. I can tell you that on my grandfather’s property that I grew up learning all this stuff on, my dad’s still picking blackberries from blackberry bushes that I picked from when I was a kid that he was picking from when he was a kid, and my grandfather planted before either one of us were ever born. We have current bushes up there like that. This stuff lasts a long time. Think about the plants reproducing themselves. So even if the initial plant you planted dies off, like a blackberry crown expands. So it continues to reproduce them. Fig trees live a thousand years.
Nurse Amy: Fig. I have six different varieties of fig trees.
Jack Spirko: Awesome.
Nurse Amy: Now the reason I buy different varieties – like the Surinam cherries, I have four different varieties – is because I don’t know which one is going to be happy in my yard. Everyone has different soil, we have different climates. Check and see what perennials do well in your area. Go to a local family nursery, don’t go to these big nurseries. I went to a big nursery, you know, Home Such-and-such, and they had blackberries. But the blackberries are from, I think it was Canada or something. It’s going to die. Why do this? So go to your local nurseries, talk to the families, people that have been doing this for years, find out what grows in your yard, and start planting them. Then focus on the raised beds and learn all of those gardening lessons. But get those perennials in. I would say put more money into your perennials than your garden beds.
Jack Spirko: I completely agree.
Nurse Amy: That food is going to be guaranteed, once it’s established, to give you a harvest. And let me tell you, you put your potatoes in, and something comes along and eats them or they rot, you don’t have any food.
Jack Spirko: Blight. Yeah, you get blight on your potatoes and they’re gone. And you can have them like they’re just about to be ready, they’re just about to set and blight hits, and just <smack> and they’re gone. Ask an Irishman, he’ll tell you about the potato famine. And I think the other thing that this makes me think of is I have a lot of people that ask me about seed banks for long-term storage of seeds. That’s fine, but if you’re not, like you said, doing the work now to learn what works. And if you want a seed bank just for when there’s a collapse, then this is the seed bank you need. You need about twenty buckets and fill them up with all different types of dried beans. That way when you can’t grow any, at least you got something to eat because the whole concept that you’re going to pull out a tube of seeds and plant an acre crisis garden once a collapse started, you’re done. You’re going to starve to death before the first seed sprouts. So you’ve got to do this stuff now, I completely agree with you.
And getting regional stuff, like you said the blackberries came from Canada? Well send a Canadian an orange tree from south Florida and see how that works out. So why would we expect it would work the other way around? One of the things I tell people to is not just what the local nurseries tell will grow well and all, but go to wild areas around you. And we all have wild areas. And look what’s growing naturally. If you have blackberries growing naturally then an improved domestic variety of blackberry will do fairly well in your area. You already know you have the right conditions for it. If you have amaranth growing you know it’s going to be a good grain crop for you. You know it’s technically a seed because growing oats or wheat, that’s really difficult on any scale. But if you can grow amaranth and quinoa and things like that, but look at what’s growing natively, if you take the counterpart to that you’re probably going to have good results.
Nurse Amy: Jack, I don’t know if you know this, but Joe and I are both master gardeners for the state of Florida. And I would really love to spend an hour with you talking about cover crops and the fact that you need to feed your soil and it’s more about feeding your soil and less about feeding the plants and what goes on under the ground that makes your plant healthier. Because just like making your body healthier for resistance to disease, if you give the plant what it needs you’re going to have less problems. And I think that’s an important thing. People don’t think about what’s underneath the soil, they’re just looking at the plant.
Jack Spirko: Well I told you folks that they were kindred spirits. Where have you heard that before, feed the soil not the plant? So I’ll tell you what, we’re about at the end of this but I would love to book you guys to come back on. We’ll look at the calendar, I’ll get with you sometime in September and bring you back on just to talk about gardening and healthcare for the land, let’s say.
Nurse Amy: That’s right. Jack, you know we’re going to meet you in Denver. We’re going to the conference.
Jack Spirko: Oh that’s awesome! Yeah, folks I’m going to be at the Self Reliance Expo in Denver – is it the 18th? The 19th? 16th and 17th.
Nurse Amy: Yeah, 16th and 17th. Yep, we’ll be there, we’re going to have a booth also and I hope you come over and do a little interview with us because we’ll be broadcasting.
Jack Spirko: Absolutely I’ll be there and I’ll be catching up with you guys while you’re there. And folks, come meet us all. Come up there and meet me, meet Dr. Bones, meet Nurse Amy, Jeff the Berkey Guy is going to be there. In fact a lot of our sponsors are going to be there. So make sure you guys come to that, I’ll put a link to the Expo website where you can learn more about it in today’s show notes as well. But guys, man this has been one of the best interviews I’ve ever done. Thank you so much.
Nurse Amy: Aww, we love you! Thank you! And I can’t wait to meet you, I’m very excited. You and your nurse wife.
Jack Spirko: Yeah, you can talk to her about getting to get on this microphone once in a while. You heard her talk to you before the show today. She’s got a fine voice, nothing wrong with it. She’s mic shy I guess, when it goes on the public airways. But guys again, thank you and again, tell everybody where they can find out more about you guys and get all your great resources.
Nurse Amy: doomandbloom.net. We also have a Twitter,
@preppershow. We have a Facebook which is
Doctor, spell it out, Bones and Nurse Amy Show. But the
doomandbloom.net is where you can get all of the information.
Jack Spirko: And I’ll link off to your site and all of your social media connections in today’s show notes as well. And with that, this has been Jack Spirko today along with Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy helping you figure out how to live that better life, if times get tough or even if they don’t.
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