[usaphp]

We went to a really good Ear nose throat doctor in San Diego hospital because our son had a long lasting runny nose, and they also told us to remove his tonsils and adenoids. I did not want to have them removed because of the involvement of sleep drugs necessary for operation, so we tried multiple ways to find the issue of the running nose, turned out it was something to do with the oil vaporizer they used in his preschool class, as soon as they removed it - his runny nose poeblem went away.

[what-the-grump]

Heh, you can do it the Russian way and yank them out while you are awake with just a topical, until your kid passes out from the pain :). That’s how my adenoids came out. Do not recommend.

[murph-almighty]

There's a scene in Roald Dahl's autobiography part one, Boy, that describes the process of getting his adenoids removed without anaesthesia. Sounded terrifying enough that I'm glad we knock people out for that sort of surgery.

[xchaotic]

I had mine removed with only mild anaesthetics and I still have nightmares about that. It also didn't help with various nose and throat infection at all. In fact I had pneumonia couple years later so not much respect for the butchers that did this to me.

[pavel_lishin]

I still have, let's call them interesting, memories of Soviet dental procedures. I think that if I were to put them on film, modern audiences would call them "torture porn".

[usaphp]

Hmm, my wife had them removed when she was a kid in Russia and says it was not that bad.

[cm2012]

People have wildly varying sensitivity to pain.

[John_KZ]

A lot of those ENT problems are related to allergies and irritants. The problem is that very often it's extremely hard to figure out what is causing the reaction and if it's an external element of the environment that can be modified. But the consensus of the medical community that formed in the last decade is that removing adenoids and tonsils should be a last-line of defense for chronic cases that affect your life significantly. That's because the solution is almost never permanent.

[arethuza]

I had years of doctors saying my nose and throat problems were caused by "allergies and irritants" - eventually one had a look up my nose and diagnosed a deviated septum (and my tonsils were already a mess).

NHS surgery to fix the deviated septum, whip out my tonsils and a couple of other things and I was much better - and that was nearly 30 years ago.

[testplzignore]

You've piqued my curiosity. Why would a preschool have an oil vaporizer?

[beauzero]

For smell. You can get Glade plugins or on the essential oils side a diffuser. We have used both in our family.

[coffeeacc]

Don't they also have female hormones in them?

[sandworm101]

Not female hormones per se, but things that are so similar as to have similar effects. This is not great for children, particularly developing boys. I've read some links between synthetic estrogen and changes in male behavior. I'd hate to think that a school might be naively using these things because they tend to calm boys down.

[bfuller]

Lavender oil can increase estrogen when used topically.

[goldenkey]

That is beyond retarded...and a school is supposed to instruct kids in the truthful ways of life? Spraying oil does NOT eliminate aromatic odor molecules. All it does is dilute their presence. In addition, all of these essential oils are from plants, which many people are randomly allergic or inflamed by. Essential oils are for a home. Spraying essential oils into public airspace is such a dick move. Sorry about your kid, sucks when people spray biologically active drugs into the air that other people have to breathe.

[winslett]

The school is looking forward to your job application to be a preschool teacher. You'll have the following benefits:

* $32k annual salary

You'll have the responsibility to take care of the most precious little things that have every walked the earth. Your management are the parents, or as they like to call themselves "the people who pay your salary". These management want you to know they would do nearly everything you attempt to do differently than you do it. They want you to know they would do it differently, but they would never actually do it.

You'll need to show up at 7:15am sharp. You'll be able to leave as soon as the last parent picks up their child, which is sometime around 6:15pm. We are happy to have you on the team.

Edit: in education, there is asymmetry of requirements (similar to the asymmetry of bullshit). The boots-on-the-ground educator has 70-years worth of legal duties to be performed. This educator is working with a wide variety of incoming supplies (i.e. the little humans). Additionally, nearly everyone thinks they are capable of being a teacher, and their own recommendations and their own requirements.

The flippant demand that we should prevent $3.50 Glade plugins in a classroom in the scope of all the other things that matter is asymmetrical bullshit. A kid had a runny nose. Medical advice was to remove tonsils. The parents pushed back and found the real problem.

Maybe the $3.50 Glade plugin covered for another kid who was being bullied because of body odor? Or, maybe it cut down on distractions from nearby human pollution odors? Perhaps, the preschool is the lowest cost preschool around because the parents are cheap and do not want to pay market-rate for childcare. Thus, to be able to break even, the preschool uses a building used has a mold and water problem.

Of all the things that can be improved with education in the US, we decide on an internet forum that a $3.50 Glade plugin is the root of all evil for education because it masks instead of removes odors.

[merpnderp]

"Of all the things that can be improved with education in the US, we decide on an internet forum that a $3.50 Glade plugin is the root of all evil for education because it masks instead of removes odors."

You need to work on your straw man game. Start with something they actually said and work your way into something they didn't actually say. But just straight up putting fake words into their mouth is far too blatant.

[wolco]

This makes me think. Could there be an opportunity for remote babysitting or remote education for the earlier grades. We can elimate the not so qualified 32k person.

[magissima]

Socialization matters much more than education at that age.

[acjohnson55]

Hell, let's just put the children in pods with feeding tubes. Then they won't require any labor.

[branchless]

No, but we need IT to stop enabling high land prices that force both parents to work.

[wb36]

So sad but true

[dEnigma]

What does any of this have to do with forcing an oil vaporizer on everyone? Are you arguing that teachers need essential oils in the air to get through the day; or is this just about the fact, that parents always have different ideas? In that case you should still err on the side of not putting random substances in the air everyone at the school has to breathe.

[always_good]

I think they're providing contrast against the hilarious suggestion that "a school is supposed to instruct kids in the truthful ways of life".

[code_duck]

It would be better if most scent diffusers used essential oils, but unfortunately, most are made with VOCs and synthetic fragrance compounds that are known or suspected to cause many health problems, like Glade plugins. Febreze and Lysol are the same but with more VOCs.

I have severe sensitivity to fragrance and cannot tolerate synthetic fragrances, incense, or essential oils. Simply being near people who use artificial deodorant, shampoo, laundry detergent, dryer sheets or any other mainstream product that leaves them covered in synthetic fragrance is very uncomfortable. Essential oils are less problematic.

With essential oils, many of the chemicals present (such as linalool and d-limonene) break down as they oxidize after diffusion, and the oxidation products have different health effects than the original chemical, such as allergy sensitization and irritation.

My mother-in-law visited for two months, and left one of the rooms in my house saturated with Young Living essential oils from a diffuser. Six months later, I still can't go in there.

[evincarofautumn]

Same—I can’t tolerate most artificial fragrances, as they make my sinuses block up and irritate my eyes & skin. Sadly they’re everywhere—between perfumes, deodorants, lotions, laundry detergents, fabric softeners, air fresheners, odour removers, shampoos, body washes, hand soaps, household cleaners, &c., a lot of people and their homes are just covered in them.

I’ve been trying to figure out the specific compounds that give me trouble and why, but there are many, and for a lot of these products, it seems like the ingredients are rarely published in full—or they use obscured chemical names—I guess because companies have some right to maintain their “secret sauce”.

I’m not chemophobic in the slightest, but I have to wonder if this wild mix of VOCs is affecting people in ways that they just don’t notice because they don’t have any allergy or irritation—such as endocrine disruption. And it will be hard to pinpoint if they do cause health problems because there are so many different compounds and they’re so common and assumed safe.

[goldenkey]

Well it's already known that even natural extracts like lavender oil are estrogen amplifiers. And the thermal receipt paper used for years, contained BPA, also an endocrine disruptor. There are tons of chemicals that we use willy nilly without any knowledge on their real and complex outcomes on life. I'd mostly prefer natural but its somewhat specious because having artificial additives means usually the whole mixture will have 10 or 15 chemicals instead of the 103485 in a plant extract. But I'd trust mother nature's 100000000000 years and human civilizations' many years of trials over an Ames test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_test

[code_duck]

Great! It's very rare to meet other people with this issue.

Manufacturers are allowed, as I'm sure you know, to list all scent component ingredients glommed together as 'fragrance'. This is supposedly because they're proprietary - they wouldn't someone to make an exact knock-off of a new perfume too easily, right? It also has the effect of making the health aspects of the formulations very difficult to analyze. It's a lot like a properietary black box in computing... EWG judges 'fragrance' as its own separate ingredient, giving it a (bad) rating of 8/10.

I have noticed 5-6 different main scent 'flavors' on all the disgusting consumer products out there, which probably correspond to specific chemicals. There's the one like fake grapes, the one that's spicy and powdery, the one I call old lady underwear, the fake fruit, the 'manly' scents, and more.

Johnson Wax (SC Johnson?) actually lists the full fragrance ingredients to products like Windex in their site - I was amazed.

I agree that these products highly likely cause widespread harm of different types, including to people who do not perceive a problem.

[Arete31415]

Try running an ozone generator in there. It will break down the compounds much more quickly. The ozone itself breaks down pretty quickly, but don't run it when people or pets are in the house.

[coaxial]

> school is supposed to instruct kids in the truthful ways of life?

If only that was true...

[michaelg7x]

Cut carb intake right down and the levels of catarrh drop right off. Observational study in the 40's or 50's by a chap called Paton.

[pc86]

They already said it was due to an oil vaporizer, I don't think carbohydrates have anything to do with it.

[michaelg7x]

Ah, good point - I misread the comment. I would reassert, though: a HC diet can leave you prone to very snotty episodes, compared to the alternative ;)

It's been one of the two most obvious beneficial changes of my LCHF foray, the other being a substantial reduction in inflammation (and no longer suffering with chronic Achilles tendonitis). N=1, IANADr, etc.

[wolco]

Certain food can produce bateria that increases ones reactions. By cutting the carbs you may see other benefits.