As if the need to feed our faces with the goodness of salted, cured pork couldn't get much more intense, a new medical study is recommending packing your nasal passages with the stuff as an effective way to treat troublesome nosebleeds.
The Guardian cites published work from Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky, and James Dworkin -- all from the Detroit Medical Center -- who successfully treated a girl with a rare hereditary disorder that brings prolonged bleeding. They used salted pork fashioned into what the team calls a "nasal tampon."
Yipes, I mean, yum. Read on for a breakdown of how-to's and history-of from medical types.
"Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively . . .," The Guardian reports the medical team from Detroit as saying, "To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia."
And from the looks of The Guardian's article, salted pork has been a remedy for nosebleeds for years, as presented in this 1953 quote from Dr. Henry Beinfield in Brooklyn:
"Salt pork placed in the nose and allowed to remain there for about five days has been used, but the method is rather old-fashioned."
So says 1953. The next time I get a red gusher from the face, I'm doing away with the tissues and goin' up there old school-style with salted pork.
