Health

There are various survival topics that we seldom see the solutions for, yet they are things that we take for granted in today's world, and to some extent are essential for our personal health and well-being. This page lists some of them, along with possible resolutions to them.

Toilet paper

• smooth stones
• mullein leaves - these can be too soft, however, and you may poke your finger through
• oak leaves - very tough
• soft bark
• leaves from other plants - need to be soft, pliable, tough.
• water is used in Asian countries with much success. However, their diet is different
• going without (this would depend on one's diet and personal preferences)
• dried corn husks - these are very strong, pliable, and partially absorbent, and work really well.
• corncobs!  They're either red or white, and an old Appalachian joke says you need two red ones and a white one:  First use a red one, then the white one to see if you need the other red one.
• sphagnum moss

Teeth & mouth care

• Dogwood stems can be used as a chew stick or toothbrush.

• Birch twigs can also be used the same way.

• Without the modern sugar-based diet, you won't need to worry about this as much

• Paste of wood ashes works as toothpaste.  Rinse thoroughly to avoid irritating gums.

• Gargle of pine needle extract (from soaking pine needles) works to freshen breath somewhat and has some antiseptic properties.

• Oak tanin (from soaking bark) is also antiseptic.

• Flossing, or more likely in a survival situation, picking your teeth is almost as important as some form of brushing. Keeping food out of the spaces between teeth as well in the hollows of molars goes a long way.  Carve some tooth picks or use thorns from non toxic plants (i.e. wild roses, hawthorns)

• Simply rub clean fingers through the teeth until they feel clean (sound like rubbing a clean wet plate). Also eliminate any food between the teeth with a small, non-toxic stick.

Soap & Washing (Clothes, Self)

• soapwort plant
• fireweed plant
• just use water and sand as an exfoliant....
• Yucca: Loaded with saponin, a well-known lathering substance, the large root of the various yuccas has been the principal source of soap for the Indians living throughout the southwest, both past and present. When pounded, the roots froth with suds. In the old days yucca root suds undoubtedly were employed for all manner of cleaning jobs; hair shampoo stands out as the most enduring use. Among other native peoples, the Navajo say a yucca shampoo will make your hair long, shiny, and black, and several Navajo ceremonies incorporate yucca washings." 
  from Wild Plants and Native Peoples of the Four Corners, p. 148
• Pour water through ashes. Collect the juice (filter it through a cloth or anything).  Mix with melted animal fat.  Cool down.  You got soap.  You can also add some flowers/needles infusion of some sort in order to get a nice smell...
• Do without. Realize that we live in a clean-obsessed society. Most primitive peoples were a lot less clean than we in this society are. Reorient your attitudes towards this issue. Get used to being a little (or a lot) less clean. It won't hurt you. If you're one of those people who counts germs on door handles, well, you've got a long way to go. Start letting go of your obsession, and practice being a little less clean. The Inuit people of far northern Canada, for example, rarely if ever washed themselves (too cold where they lived). They got along fine.
• For washing clothes ... most "primitive" cultures simply used water. Water is naturally soft (surface water, as in streams and rivers), and so will wash clothes fairly well. Millions still wash their clothes that way in India and other countries around the world.

Insect repellent

• From Tom Brown: "Grandfather had always said that the natural diet of survival would make us tasteless to insects, and, judging from the soldier's antics, he was right again. I could not remember the last time I had been bitten by anything." From pages 134 and 135 in The Way of the Scout.

• Take a hand full of wild onions, or wild leeks, and rub them between your hands until you get the juices out. Use like bug repellant. It doesn't smell the best but it works.

• In an extreme situation cover exposed areas of skin with mud.

• Burn smudge sage, or incense....the smoke really keeps them away....and funny, it didn't keep
  the other critters away

• A smoky fire (use green plant material)

• If you are only eating foods native to that area you don't smell as interesting to them.

• Eat cloves of garlic every day.  Keeps people away as well.

• Vitamin B1

• Cedar smudging is supposed to drive insects out of the debris hut, so smudging your clothes may help.

• I was walking in the woods down at the James river the other day. The tiger mosquitoes were swarming me. I tried rubbing some spicebush berries on me. They really didn't seem to help so I grabbed some leaves of a nearby jewelweed plant and rubbed the juice over my body. The mosquitoes left me alone. The next day I was back and got a whole jewelweed plant and rubbed it on me. It wasn't nearly as effective, but did reduce the bites some. Today I was at the river again and the mosquitoes were swarming me. This time I used just leaves from some smaller plants and it worked, until I went swimming which must've washed it off.

• Eating a lot of black pepper works great.  Most bugs HATE the smell of  black pepper

• Another bug repellant that is in common use by treeplanters in Northern Ontario (outside all day in one of the buggiest places on earth) is oil or grease. Applied to the skin it works wonders. Mosquitoes, blackflies and no see ums can't bite through it (it clogs their mouthparts) and in some cases they get stuck and drown.
  A trick that is regularly employed is to reduce the amount of clothing you wear to the bare minimum so that the insects don't crowd your face (lots of exposed skin on your back for them to land on, only its protected with oil.) I used this method for 6 seasons and it was better than DEET!
  Just don't forget sun screen.

Diapers, Menstrual care

• moss - sphagnum moss in particular
• soft hides, such as rabbit
• some native peoples made their own cloth
• milkweed fluff

• Jewelweed helps cure poison ivy: rub the juice from the stems on the affected area.

Skunk spray

• One approach is to accept the smell -- maybe it wouldn't matter too much, and might be a good thing.  Some people don't mind the smell too much and in any case you would smell less human with skunk odor.
• Charcoal/ ash.  Is masks most odors, would probably help with the skunk.
• Stinging nettle juice...  It is acidic and would probably break up whatever stinks
• Some acid mixture from the ants (the large army ants), crush and smear on yourself. Then a mix of sweet gale and sweet fern wash or a "strong" brewed birch wash (Allan "Bow" Beauchamp)
• Roll in the mud, slather it all over.  Probably would take a week or more to go away completely.
• Urine
• Try boiled and steeped pine needles.
• Try plants in the same family as tomato, and also Creosote  bush.
• The smelly stuff from Mr. Skunk is an oily material so do whatever you can to remove oil.  Lots of water and any soap-like material you can find will eventually remove much of the oil.  The problem is it only takes a small amount of the oil to saturate your smeller, so at first you won't be able to tell you are doing any good.
• If you have access to baking soda to add to your soap solution you will probably be doing as much as possible in the wilderness setting.  If you also have hydrogen peroxide to add to the soda-soap mixture you will have the best known formulation for eliminating the smell.  The latter combination works very well
  and very fast.
• In my experience tomato juice doesn't really work to remove the skunk oil.  It does cover up the smell somewhat if it's not too strong, but as the smell of the tomato dissipates the skunk smell comes back.
• If you ever get sprayed in the eyes by a skunk, you will go blind for up to five hours afterward, with the eyes burning like they are  on fire. Rinsing the eyes immediately with urine, will neutralize the blinding spray.

• Why bother?
• One person suggested trying wet wood ashes (??), although you are likely to burn yourself. BE CAREFUL.
• Flint-knapped knife - ouch.

Sterilizing

• Though most people today consider urine to be 'dirty', it's actually  sterile, works great to wash out wounds, if there isn't sterile water around.

Nail Clippers

• Bite them.

• Sanding them down with an appropriate rock.  That's what emery boards are, well, except for the fact that they aren't rocks.

Towel or equivalent

• Fire, air drying... Skin is wash and wear, no ironing
• shredded cedar bark

• Thin notches in a flat-edged piece of wood
• Teasel seed heads, after they have shed their seeds.
• Yucca: hairbrushes made from the pointy ends of the leaves are found in some ancestral puebloan sites by archeologists
• Echinacea seed heads

Rain (especially when it's cold)

• Many peoples around the world made "rain capes" from reeds: try cattails, phragmites, etc.
• Large pieces of bark sewn together into a hood: Birchbark, elm bark, cedar are possibilities.

-- These websites may also interest you --

Ontario Wildflowers   Ontario Trees & Shrubs   Ontario Ferns   Ontario Grasses   Ontario Insects
Mumart   World of Mosses   Wild Ontario   Trans-Labrador Hwy   James Bay Road   Rupert River   Moped Trip
Wildwood Survival   Wildwood Tracking   Leatherwood Trail   Tracker Trail   Earth Caretaker   Wildwood Canada

Thank you for visiting!