By Atty. Antonio Pekas
Over our Thursday Club lunch, we were treated to the story of our brod’s electrical engineer son working at the Petron refinery in Bataan who was afflicted with dengue. He had been having off and on fever for three days already but the company doctor said that it was just the flu so what he needed was paracetamol and some rest. You see, doctors can also be stupid. Luckily the guy wenT to another doctor in a nearby hospital and it was confirmed he had dengue.
He called up his father, our brod who was a retired police officer, who immediately boiled some tawa tawa leaves growing in his backyard here in Baguio, poured the soup or the concoction in a thermos and drove down to Bataan, He made his son drink the tawa tawa soup or tea and within the day, his platelet count started climbing. It was that immediate. He was recovering.
Our very own columnist Dr. Tedler Depaynos was there and he enlightened us even more. If somehow one can keep the platelet count at normal or tolerable levels, the patient will recover as the virus causing dengue, like any other virus,, is self-limiting. Well, that was from a surgeon who had a long hospital experience and as a professor at SLU’s College of Medicine.
He also informed us about the emergency measure of transfusion of blood platelets which can be obtained from the Red Cross whose local chapter in Baguio City has hi-tech enough equipment to separate the platelets from blood. Moral of the story is to donate blood to the Red Cross to save lives. Sometime in the future, it might be yours or you rloved one’s life that will need to be saved.
As to natural remedies agsint dengue, these had been the subject matters of a series of articles also by our other medical columnist Dr. Penny A. Domogo. Just the other week, she wrote about the best defense against dengue, which is by keeping the immune system strong by avoiding sugar.
She also enumerated the readily available plants that can elevate the platelet count of a person such as the tawa tawa (bobotonis, or for the iBontocs, pongpongo), camote leaves or papaya leaves. She mentioned these of course in the past. What do you do with these plants? Boil them and drink the tea. In the case of camote leaves, you can eat these too.
She vouched that these are effective from her many years of experience as a rural doctor.
One of our brods on that lunch said that the raw papaya leaves can be readily fed into a juicer and then drink the juice. I guess it will taste yucky but that’s how medicines are. If tastes bad then it is medicine. The “badder” the taste, the more effective it should be. That is of course just my personal rule. He he he.
For further emphasis, however, was Dr. Domogo’s injunction that validates the truism that an ounce of prevention is better than a ton of curing the disease when it is already there. That is, keep your immune system strong and one sure way of doing it is avoiding sugar.
If you want more details (the whys and the hows) which she explained so clearly in our August 4, 2019 issue just open the article on our website—zigzag weekly.net. It will still be there for several weeks.
So there. A very good way of navigating your way through the labyrinth of dangerous diseases is never to miss the articles of our experienced and very competent medical columnists. Miss them at your own peril. The life you save by reading them regularly might be your own or that of a loved one.
At the very least, it will save you some big money. **
