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My Gran, who died just before her 105th birthday, passed this on to me...
“You can treat a cold and get better in 7 days or you can do nothing and get better in a week” Despite what myriads of marketers would have you believe, there really is no cure for the common cold, at least not yet. And as much as colds cause a ridiculous amount of misery, assuming we do one day find a way to really stop them, what else will be strong enough to make much of the adult population take a rest once in a while and yet do no lasting harm? When people are honest about it there is a consistent pattern of how colds strike, it's not accidental. People get colds when they get tired and run down and they usually get colds when they ‘can’ get them. We often successfully resist the infections going on around us until the very next day after we have finally finished that project, or reached the weekend, or looked after everyone else through the worst of their sickness etc; the timing is usually anything but accidental. The most honest advice I think I or anyone else can give right now is that, if you have a cold and you are only in the first week that you got sick; then stop fighting, try and make the most of the forced rest, and trust that the more you rest, the better you will get.
This is the main point I want to say; Fevers are the body’s way of activating the immune system. It is very rare that they should be supressed and sometimes they actually need to be encouraged! Before I go on, if you haven’t already registed just how completely opposite the above statement is to the conventional mentality then I need to explain a couple of things. Most people in the modern world have grown up believing that fevers are very bad things that need to be stopped as quickly as possible. Drugs that can lower fever such as aspirin, and more recently paracetamol, have only been around for a little while in evolutionary terms but they have been extraordinarily popular in terms of how much they are used as an every day part of life around the world. When you start getting sick from an infection, one of the first things that happens is that your body adjusts its internal thermostat upwards. Having a temperature, even the beginnings of one, makes you feel horrible. The higher your body tries to push your temperature up the worse you feel. At the bottom end of this scale you just feel lousy; tired and out of sorts. At the top end you can feel like your bones are going to break into tiny pieces, people often say "they thought they were going to die", they may smile about it after but they were not joking at the time! Nobody in their right minds likes to feel this way. This is why aspirin, paracetamol etc have been so wildly successful. They stop the fever process in its tracks and stop you feeling bad just as quickly. ~ Is there a problem with this? Sometimes yes, very much so. Nature has evolved the fever mechanism over hundreds of thousands of years for some very good reasons. Every degree your body temperature rises the activity of your immune system just about doubles. So if you go up two degrees it is about 4 times as active, if you go up three degrees it can be turned on about 8 times as much as usual! This comes at a hefty price though, i.e. you feel tired, sore etc. but on the other hand the effect of that raised temperature and simultaneously raised immune activiity can and should be a much faster and more complete resolution of the infection that caused the fever to start in the first place. In my clinic I have met many people who have had a serious enough infection to develop a temperature. The most classic example is glandular fever in their teens. Eventually most of them resort to taking some form of panadol or aspirin. For many people this is not a problem and their immune system is still perfectly able to resolve the infection with no long term issues. Those are generally not the people I get to meet because, also for many people, the infection never gets properly dealt with and for even years later people can go through recurrent 'relapses' of getting sick similar to how they did in the first place. The difference in the relapses is that they do not spike a fever or if they do it is only a very half-hearted attempt, generally they just get the tiredness etc. Teenagers and adults who don’t resolve their infections, especially viral infections, can become chronically tired.
Children can get sick really quickly. Every parent has seen this happen with their own eyes. Playing around like crazy one minute and as floppy as a rag doll the next. They can get their temperatures up really quickly. The problems occur when the child gets sick again and again. I often meet children who have been sicker in the last year more than they have been well. Children have to develop their own immunity. They are not born with ready made white blood cells, firstly they borrow their mothers immunity if they are breast feeding and then they gradually develop their own. Assuming, that is, that such children get infections and learn how to deal with them. No-one wants to see their child suffer but I am usually able to persuade mum or dad to try nursing them through their next infection without using a fever lowering drug and that is often the key turning point to breakling the cycle of infections and developing their own strength to deal with the next one much better. You do need to have one essential piece of equipment to do this, namely a thermometer, but the process is actually pretty simple. I usually suggest something along the lines of ... “Keep your child warm and well-watered. If they complain of being too hot then do not cool their whole body down but use a cool, wet flannel (a soft cloth soaked in cool water) to put on the back of their neck. If you really have to lower the temperature quickly, put the wet flannel on their feet. That takes it down a degree in as little as a minute. I know, I have 5 children, I would not be telling you all this out of a book, believe me! The key thing is to use the numbers and trust the numbers. For those of you are reading this who think in Fahrenheit, you or Google will have to do the number exchange. In celsius the level you should feel very happy about them getting up to is around 39 degrees (normal is about 37). If your child (or you for that matter, we aren’t any different, just bigger and older) gets to 39 and hovers around there then ‘watch this space’, things will usually get better very quickly indeed, i.e. over night. They may skirt close to 40 degrees and even briefly top 40; again, no problem. The level I think is the safe maximum is 41, and that level hardly ever happens with childhood colds, flus, ear infections etc. If it does you can easily cool them off with the cool flannel to the back of the neck or feet, that always seems to work. If you ever talk about this with a doctor from conventional medicine they will bring out the ‘febrile convulsions’ argument, and usually effectively scare the bejesus out of you with it. And they will be wrong, and out of date. Febrile convulsions affect a small percentage of all children, they happen whatever the temperature goes up to, it makes no difference whether it is a little or a lot. If a child is prone to febrile convulsions they will get them with any quick rise of temperature. Most importantly, febrile convulsions are not dangerous, they just look scary. You should google this and get all the evidence you need to understand this is not just my opinion, these are facts. Children who go through this natural process of getting sick and getting better without stopping the natural process usually seem to quickly develop their own healthy immunity. I have had a lot of cases where we did this and the cycle of infections stopped rightaway after they went through the first one. Working with children is great in this way; they can get better ultra fast. Children are unlikely to need the heating therapies described below but it is probably not a bad idea for you to know about them in any case. Plus you should know that the older the child, the harder it is for them to get a fever going.
Raising a person’s temperature to the point of sustained, profuse perspiration has been, since ancient times, one of the most powerful healing practices known. It is called diaphoresis and herbs that help the process along are known as diaphoretics. Most people instinctively grasp the concept of how valuable it can be to ‘sweat out the bad stuff’ and anyone who has experienced a flu where they felt chilled, restless and aching until one night they finally broke out in a sweat and then quickly got better from that moment can understand first-hand how Nature evolved fever mechanisms for excellent reasons. Most of what follows are copied from the practical instructions in the patient handout that I use. The only difference you need to know about is at the end when I talk about the tea. You should definitely use a herbal tea to do this properly but you do not have to worry that you are not getting it from me. All you have to do is use some good quality Chamomile, which anyone can get, Chamomile is perfect for this. For what it is worth, and if you are interested or you have access to more herbs, the tea we use is
The ‘part’ business just means the proportions; we use the same amount of all of them except for the boneset where we use half the amount. Patients of the clinic are given a small jar of it. For the most part they are people who have been sick for ages and have chronically depressed immune systems. We might do the heating treatment twice a week for a month, so they need a little bit of tea. The dose, say you were using just chamomile, has to be stronger than a usual cup of herbal tea. If you were using average chamomile tea bags I would put no less than 4 into a tea pot of some description. For a combination of the above kinds of herbs I would be using around 3 or 4 heaped tsps to one or two cups of freshly boiled water. Whatever you use, make sure you keep the tea hot, simply put a thick towel over the tea pot, or ask your own Gran for a tea-cosy. I am sure they still exist. . Opening up the circulation and getting up a good sweat has been seen to help many people shift out of a pattern of illness. It is a tough therapy in terms of comfort levels but it is extremely safe. I have personally used this technique for hundreds of patients over the years and can verify that it works, and moreover usually works fast. . There are three stages, all equally important.
~ Here they are : Most people will need to use a bath to achieve a sufficient rise in body temperature to start the sweat. If you do not have a bath or your problems make it difficult to get in and out of one then your second best option is going to be a long, hot shower. There is no set time or temperature for either the bath or shower. The simple measure of whether you have it hot enough or have been in there for long enough can be seen in your skin and felt in your pulse. You should (in the bath) notice the sweat beginning to come out and flow freely, not just the few droplets that will come at first. You should also begin to feel your pulse getting noticeably stronger and faster, even pounding, but people will experience this to different degrees so don’t get caught up in it, suffice to say that your pulse rate will definitely be raised by the time you are sweating
It is vital that, as soon as you get out of the bath or shower, you keep the heat from rapidly escaping from your skin and thereby cooling you down too quickly. You need to have a robe and/or blanket(s) readily to hand so you can trap in enough heat to ensure a sustained sweat. How do you know how much to wrap up and for how long? Again there are no fixed times or blanket thicknesses, people vary in how much they need in these regards. The first time you do this you should err on the side of caution and wrap up very warmly indeed. You have to get a sustained sweat and, if this is not naturally easy for you, you will need plenty of ‘keeping hot’ to do it. There is a point of overdoing it where you will feel distinctly uncomfortable and just too hot (the pulse is usually really racing at this stage), in that case open a vent in your ‘tent’ and let out some heat faster. As the water evaporates from your skin (which it quickly will) you will release a lot of heat from your body. Try to aim for at least 5 minutes of sustained sweating, 5 minutes is plenty but if you can get to 10 (or even 15 minutes at the most) that would be even better. This part of the treatment is probably not that much fun but it usually isn’t an unpleasant smelly sweat, much more watery…
The tea part of the treatment takes it from being mildly beneficial (like a sauna) into a whole other realm of usefulness. Ingredients in the chamomile or the diaphoretic tea will rapidly be absorbed and will open up your circulation in ways that heat alone would not be able to do. You should get the tea ready before you run the bath or get into the shower so that when you are sitting or lying in your blanket at stage 2 you have it ready. You should sip it hot so make sure the tea pot or saucepan is covered and kept hot. Diaphoretic herbs are not famously tasty; it is very ok to add some honey. Make sure you have plenty of fluids in the day after doing the treatment! |
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Colds, Flu's, Fevers video
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