How to Make a Dog Pass the Plastic Bag It Ate
Did your dog just swallow a plastic bag?
Don’t panic yet; here’s a simple way to make your dog pass the plastic bag right out of its system.
This happened to my sister’s dog, a black lab.
This black lab made the poor life choice of consuming a plastic shopping bag that must have come in contact with food stuff.
Sometimes things happen with dogs too quickly for their owners to intercept; before she knew it, my sister’s lab had eaten the plastic bag.
Once the bag had been consumed and was going through the process of digestion, the only solution was to speed up the process to ensure the indigestible item came out the other side without causing serious and potentially fatal bowel obstructions.
I’m not recommending you bypass taking your pet to an emergency vet clinic, but what if that’s not an immediate option?
What if this occurs after hours and there’s no nearby vet clinic open?
What if this occurs while there’s a snowstorm?
What if your car doesn’t start or is not available?
Oil Based Solution to Dog Eating a Plastic Bag
A tablespoon of vegetable or fish oil, mixed in with the dog’s food, assisted in this process.
On the morning the evidence of her wrongdoing arrived, she was struggling and straining in her morning movement.
The poor black lab made every attempt to move the plastic bag from her backside, but she required assistance to get it out.
Only a portion of the bag would come out, regardless of her straining.
After minutes of desperate trying, my sister assisted the dog in pulling out a significant portion of the plastic bag, but it wasn’t the complete item.
The remainder of the plastic shopping bag required ongoing use of vegetable or fish oil to assist the lab in passing the foreign items from her bowel.
As my sister’s husband suggested at the time, “Easy in, easy out!” my sister moved the item through the dog’s bowels as quickly as possible with the help of the oil’s lubricating effect.
So in the absence of a veterinarian’s help, you now have a potentially feasible solution that may help your dog pass a plastic bag that it just ate.
Nevertheless, don’t wait for this event to occur before you ask your veterinarian about this method.
Get a vet’s opinion first, and then do whatever it takes to keep plastic bags out of your dog’s mouth’s reach.
Lorra Garrick has been covering medical, fitness and cybersecurity topics for many years, having written thousands of articles for print magazines and websites, including as a ghostwriter. She’s also a former ACE-certified personal trainer.
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Is It Safe for Elderly Women to Try Pull-ups?
If you’re an elderly woman who’d like to learn to do pull-ups, then go for it!
Elderly age, in and of itself, does not make it harmful for a woman to train at pull-ups or chin-ups.
“There’s no specific contraindication for an elderly woman without shoulder issues to try chin-ups,” says D’Wan Carpenter, DO, a board certified physical medicine and rehabilitation physician with SIMEDHealth in FLA.
“If she has never tried any exercise like this before, it would be best to work her way up to it.
“She will have to understand she will be relying solely on her arms to be able to lift the rest of her body. As long as both upper extremities are injury-free she is safe to try chin-ups.”
Brittle Bones
In fact, if a woman over age 65 has osteoporosis (brittle bone disease), her contraindications are impact exercise like running, jumping and certain forms of other aerobic activity.
Pull-up/chin-up training is a non-impact activity that’s safe on the joints.
Built-In Safety of Pull-ups
And I’ve got news for you: It’s not easy to overdo it with pull-up training. It’s pretty much basically this: You either can or you can’t do it.
It’s not like, say, the bench press, where you can keep straining and straining with endless sets and countless repetitions because you can adjust the weight of the barbell. You can then end up hurting a shoulder joint.
But with chin-ups, once you begin fatiguing, you have no choice but to quit and recharge fully before your next set, since you can’t adjust your body weight like you can adjust a barbell weight.
Depositphotos.com
Though sets can be overdone in terms of volume if a woman uses a gravity-assist machine, I strongly urge against this device, as it’s a poor way to learn to do a chin-up or pull-up. (More on that coming up)
So the issue isn’t the safety of pull-up and chin-up training for an elderly woman. The issue is her fitness level at the time she decides to pursue this goal.
Another issue is her body weight. If she’s overweight, learning chin-ups will be a lot more difficult than if she’s, say, 125 pounds.
Requirements for an Elderly Woman to Learn a Chin-Up
“Elderly” literally means over age 65, though the senior citizen discount at retailers begins at age 55; and age 55 and over is what often applies to senior housing. But you get the point.
A woman over age 55 or 65 who has a base fitness level from long-term strength training, and who’s not overweight, is an excellent candidate to learn chin-ups.
She is more likely to injure her elbows playing golf or tennis, by the way.
Next, she needs a healthy pair of stable shoulders; no rotator cuff issues or painful bursitis.
A requirement is the ability to dead hang from a bar for 20 seconds. This can take a while to build up to.
Once a senior woman is able to dead hang for 20, maybe 30 seconds, she will be that much closer to developing the strength to pull herself halfway up.
Assist Machines
Stay away from these. Though this article is about whether or not chin-up training is safe for the elderly woman, I’m going to briefly explain why assist machines are useless.
They skewer the position that the body naturally hangs in when hanging from a bar without the feet touching anything below.
If you’re doing pull-ups or chin-ups while your feet are connected to a moving platform that subtracts body weight, this will fail to mimic the natural hanging position.
In order to develop sufficient strength to pull yourself up with your feet dangling in the air, you must train with your feet dangling in the air.
So how do you train if you can’t even pull up one inch?
I’ll end up with a 2,000-word post if I explain everything, but suffice it to say that you must develop strength with cable pull-down motions, rowing motions and core-strengthening activities like pushups, kettlebell swings and planks.
And then practice your dead hanging.
At some point you’ll feel ready to attempt a pull. Have a partner place their hands on your waist to help you. You can also practice with tension bands.
Another way to practice is to have a stool at your feet so that you can pull up while your feet are still on the stool to help subtract body weight.
Unlike the assist machine, this subtraction won’t skewer your body’s natural hang position enough to thwart your training.
It is perfectly safe for an elderly woman, under the aforementioned circumstances, to learn how to do chin-ups and pull-ups.
Dr. Carpenter is one of the nation’s top board-certified physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians, a national speaker, medical legal expert and independent medical examiner. She is founder and Chief Medical Officer of DJC Physical Medicine Consultants. Follow Dr. D’Wan on Twitter.
Lorra Garrick is a former personal trainer certified through the American Council on Exercise. At Bally Total Fitness she trained women and men of all ages for fat loss, muscle building, fitness and improved health.
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Top image: ©Lorra Garrick
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