Please note that Tea Tree Oil “is toxic when swallowed. It has been reported to cause drowsiness, confusion, hallucinations, coma, unsteadiness, weakness, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach upset, blood cell abnormalities, and severe rashes. It should be kept away from pets and children.” If applied inside ears, it can cause hearing loss, or if applied in great concentration to the skin, and also be toxic.

You can buy it any local pharmacy over the counter or at grocery stores. Amazon also sells it: Tea Tree 100% Pure Therapeutic Grade Essential Oil – 30 ml.

I’ve been using it on a spider bite and a couple mosquito bites (hmm, bugs like to bite me… ) and it’s working well and helping them heal much more rapidly than usual. It has an interesting smell, but a thin application twice a day for a week seems to be working well.

Dear Apple Community,

For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote.

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.

I’ve decided to share something very personal with the Apple community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.

Steve

This comes in response to a post on Gizmodo, Steve Jobs’ Health Declining Rapidly, Reason for Macworld Cancellation, which alleges that “Steves health is rapidly declining. Apple is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically vs letting the hype destroy apple when the inevitable news comes later this spring.”

When this latest revelation is coupled with the previous delays we’ve seen in reporting Job’s health problems, the only thing we can expect is worse news. If you follow Apple and appreciate its products, do not be surprised if Steve Jobs resigns as CEO, or is replaced by the Apple board following a deterioration in his health, or death.

Update: It appears that the common thought that Jobs is sicker than Apple’s willing to admit was true. Apple just released a press release stating that Steve Jobs’ “health-related issues are more complex than [he] originally thought” and that he “decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”

Please see Disclosure & Legal Notice for information about conflicts of interest and this post. Disclosure: Short Apple at time of publication.

Did you know that 500,000 patients in American hospitals contract a staph infection every year? Or that staph infection is in the top four post-op complications?

By itself, a staph infection didn’t used to be serious. In 1943, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by watching it act against a staph colony in a petri dish. A few years later, by 1950 as much as 40% of hospital S. Aureus were resistant to penicillin. By 1960, 80% were. This is the precursor to the modern MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) problem.

MRSA is simply evolved S. Aureus. Over time, in hospital settings, this simple bacteria was exposed to all kinds of antibiotics. Over time, most of them died, but the survivors had a mutation that protected them, which they passed on to their children. Today (well, these numbers are from 2005) 31.8 out of every 100,000 Americans acquire an MRSA infection. This is 94,360 cases and 18,650 deaths nationwide a year, 150% as many deaths as caused by AIDS.

References: Staphylococcus aureus and MRSA

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy” — meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.

The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients’ rights against those of health-care workers who assert a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.

“The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience — that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral,” said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. “Every pharmacist has the right to do the same thing,” Brejcha said.

They cite a think tank who has the same immediate objection that comes to my mind:

“If you are a health-care professional, you are bound by professional obligations,” said Nancy Berlinger, deputy director of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y. “You can’t say you won’t do part of that profession.”

There’s a good article here about why faith must not trump the Hippocratic oath. It’s for the same reason that in diagnosis Doctors follow established statistical treatment plans; they’re proven to optimally treat patients. Some religions don’t allow blood-transfusions, yet they are critical processes for recovery in many severe traumas. As a medical professional, can you ethically refuse to dispense a medication simply because you find it personally distasteful?

Did you know that:

• Marijuana contains more than 400 chemicals, including most of the harmful substances found in tobacco smoke. Smoking one marijuana cigarette deposits about four times more tar into the lungs than a filtered tobacco cigarette. (Drug Enforcement Administration)
• Risk of a heart attack is five times higher than usual in the hour after smoking marijuana. (Harvard University, Marijuana & Heart Attacks, Washington Post, 3/3/2000)
• Reaction time for motor skills, such as driving, is reduced by 41% after smoking one joint and is reduced 63% after smoking two joints.

Still, there is substantial belief that Marijuana is harmless or that it is valuable as a therapeutic drug for cancer, AIDS, or depression. There is some evidence that a synthetic cannabinoid derived from THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) named Dronabinol, can help with Alzheimer in the elderly. The most common reason for a “legal prescription” of Marijuana (the so-called medical marijuana legal in California) is to relieve pain.

Reuters today reported on a story that will make you cringe, though. Heavy marijuana use shrinks brain talks about a study published in the American Medical Association’s journal Archives of General Psychiatry by two Australian researchers looking at men who had smoked at least five joints a day for 20 years. Brain scans indicated their hippocampus and amygdala were smaller compared to nonusers:

The hippocampus regulates memory and emotion, while the amygdala plays a critical role in fear and aggression.

“These findings challenge the widespread perception of cannabis as having limited or no harmful effects on (the) brain and behavior,” said Murat Yucel of ORYGEN Research Centre and the University of Melbourne, who led the study. “Like with most things, some people will experience greater problems associated with cannabis use than others,” Yucel said in an e-mail. “Our findings suggest that everyone is vulnerable to potential changes in the brain, some memory problems and psychiatric symptoms if they use heavily enough and for long enough.”

Among the 15 heavy marijuana users in the study, the hippocampus volume was 12 percent less and the amygdala volume was 7 percent less than in 16 men who were not marijuana users, the researchers said.

Criticism of the study centers around the fact that these men are extremely heavy users; had they been smokers or alcoholics, the effects would certainly have been more pronounced. Note that I am not a medical doctor, and this cannot constitute medical advice, but my opinion on Marijuana would be to generally avoid it. It’s clear that it’s harmless in moderation and small amounts, but over time it seems as if it can have profound effects, dumbing down your brain and numbing your nervous system. What do you think? Is there a cost, and is it worth it?