11 Interesting Uses For Butter

• If you have anything sticky on your hands, like glue, tar, or paint, just rub with butter, then wash with soap and water.
• Gum in hair comes off easier if rubbed with butter.
• Tree sap on a car comes off easier if rubbed with butter before washing.
• Cutting things like marshmallows, pies, toffee, dates is easier if you slice the knife through butter first so it does not stick.
• Butter works like oil to shine shoes, baseball gloves, etc. Just put some on a cotton swab and rub in.
• Large pills can go down a bit easier if rubbed with a bit of butter before swallowing.
• Butter works like expensive skin oils to soften cuticles and nails and to soften dry skin. it can also be used in a pinch to replace shaving lotion.
• Rubbing butter on hard cheese helps keep down mold if you rub it on the cut edge before wrapping.
• Dingy dusty holiday candles can be brought back to life by rubbing with butter. It cleans and brings back the shine.
• Difficult to remove rings slide off easy if you apply butter first.
• After handling and cleaning fish, rub some butter on your hands before washing with soap and water to remove the smell.
• Last, butter is not good to rub on burns, use an ice cube instead.

Placebo and Color Affect

Researchers found the color of a package and a pill makes a difference in how it works. In one study, every patient was given the exact same sedative, but some patients received it in a blue pill and others in an orange pill. The blue pill takers reported falling asleep 30 minutes faster, and sleeping 30 minutes longer, than the orange pill takers.

You likely know that you can give a person with a headache a Tic Tac, say it is medicine, and it may eliminate a headache just like an aspirin would, for reasons science doesn't completely understand. This phenomenon is also affected by color. In other words, how you perceive effectiveness affects effectiveness and color matters.

Subjects, in another study were told they would get a sedative or a stimulant, when they were actually getting placebos. Sixty six percent of the subjects who took blue pills reported feeling less alert, compared to only twenty six percent of those who took pink pills. It is because we have been conditioned to think that blue is tranquil.

In yet another study, when researchers put various fake medicine packages in front of subjects, the subjects picked certain colors of boxes over others. Warm colors like brown and red were perceived as more potent, especially if the shades were darker. This is why heart medicines are often red and brown, while skin medicines are yellow, and sleeping pills are often blue. Painkillers are most often white. All carefully chosen to match our perceptions.

The majority of fast food chains have red and yellow or orange in their logo, because these are stimulating colors. Lowfat containers, more often than not have blue on the package.

Color associations are also cultural. In America blue is a calming and peaceful color, but in Italy it is associated with the national soccer team. Researchers found that, rather than making him drowsy, a blue pill might send an Italian singing into the night.

Origin of Pills

Before the turn of the 20th century, patients who needed medicine either took it as a liquid or a hard pill. However, the liquids often tasted terrible and the pills usually didn't even dissolve in patients’ stomachs. In 1875, William Upjohn, a University of Michigan student began experimenting with new pill formulas that would be more effective. He is the main reason pills are now such a convenient means of medication.

Wordology, Pills

Properly speaking a pill traditionally has been round shaped (due to manufacturing limitations) and a tablet is a mixture of pharmacological substances pressed into a small cake or bar.

A pill can be a capsule, which usually contains liquid, or a pellet, which usually is dry pressed. Pills can also be lozenges, which were traditionally diamond shaped and are usually sucked, rather than swallowed.

Here is the order of pills that act the quickest: Liquids, Liqui-gel caps, Chew or rapid-release tablets, Capsules, Hard tablets.

So, all tablets are pills, but all pills are not tablets.

If you find this hard to swallow, take two aspirin and see me next week.

Smarter Pills

The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a device that is integrated into pills and let’s doctors know when patients take their medicine and when they don’t.

The device, made by Proteus Digital Health, is a silicon chip about the size of a sand particle. With no battery and no sensor, it is powered by the body itself. The chip contains small amounts of copper and magnesium. After being ingested the chip will interact with digestive juices to produce a voltage that can be read from the surface of the skin through a detector patch, which then sends a signal via mobile phone to inform the doctor that the pill has been taken.

Sensors on the chip also detect heart rate and can estimate the patient’s amount of physical activity. It will allow doctors to better assess if a person is responding to a given dose, or if that dose needs to be adjusted.

It has been in clinical trials since 2009, but currently the FDA has only approved the chip for placebo pills, which were used in trials showing the chip to be safe and highly accurate. Proteus hopes to gain approval to use the digestible chip with other medicines. Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus, says the chip has already been tested with treatments for tuberculosis, mental health, heart failure, hypertension, and diabetes.

The company is currently working with makers of metformin, a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes and the most commonly prescribed drug in the world. The company also plans on adding a wireless glucose meter to their device so that dosage amount and frequency can be correlated with changes in blood glucose levels.

Six Uses for Butter

Butter isn't just good for topping toast and popcorn. There are plenty of other things it is useful for, such as:

Swallowing pills: Coat the pills with a thin layer of butter to make them go down easier, especially bigger pills and ones that have no coating.

De-stress cats: If you're moving or throwing a party, your cat can get a bit stressed by the sudden change in the environment. Put a little dab of butter on the top of her paws. She'll be distracted by cleaning herself.

Prevent cheese mold: Put a thin coat of butter on the cheese after you cut it so it won't get too hard or start molding, especially harder cheeses.

Preserve onions: If you cut an onion in half and decide to leave the other half in the fridge, coat the exposed side with a bit of butter to keep it fresh longer.