Natural Remedies

Things to try before a trip to the doctor

My mom was born in 1942 in Germany, and when the war ended three years later, the poverty, especially in the small farming village they’d escaped to 12 hours ahead of the Russian invasion, was real. She was raised in a house without indoor plumbing, with their vegetable garden and one chicken a week the major source of their food. Once a year my grandmother would send someone to the pharmacy to buy the leeches that drained the open wounds in her legs (her legs froze during the winter, on-foot flight from the Russian bombs, and she later developed diabetes) and medicinal leeches are still sold in German pharmacies today. My dad had spent most of his young life living in a trailer, following his dad’s work as a gravel pit foreman, and his post-war upbringing was spent mostly in a small California desert town without a lot of access to amenities most of us take for granted. Despite my dad’s small town law practice, we didn’t have health insurance until I was thirteen, when my mom graduated from law school, so home remedies, especially the ones my mom had grown up with in (literally) war-torn Germany, were ALWAYS our first line of defense against childhood illnesses.

When we have kids, we usually either become our parents, or not our parents, so it isn’t a surprise to me that my mom’s home remedies, plus others I picked up along the way from my sister (an ER doctor), our midwives, and my kids’ pediatrician, have always been first on my list to try before calling for help.

Colds

At the first sign of a cold or a sore throat, everyone in my family drinks the juice of a lemon (we live in California, and there are always lemons on somebody’s tree) mixed with either cold or hot water. The hit of acid apparently makes the body produce more alkaline to counter-balance the acid build-up, and that’s what aids the immune system in its fight against the intruder. It could be pure b.s., but the combo of the lemon juice and cutting out all sugar for a couple of days works nearly every time if we catch it fast enough.

And if we don’t catch it, and the cold settles into a sore throat, my mom boiled a whole grapefruit (cut in half, peel and all) and then added lots of honey to make it palatable. The hot grapefruit/honey drink worked to soothe a sore throat, and also calmed the ravages of coughing.

When my mom was little, a pot of steaming water with Eucalyptus oil drops added was the remedy for any type of congestion, and I remember sitting with my face bent over the steam and a towel over my head and the pot. I disliked it enough not to inflict it on my own kids, but as a remedy for teenage acne, it was brilliant.

I had bronchitis when I was pregnant with our first kid, and our midwives prescribed propolis tincture – 5-7 drops, twice a day. It has to be taken with juice because propolis tincture tastes foul, but it absolutely works. Four days later my bronchitis was gone without antibiotics. Getting kids to take propolis drops in juice wasn’t easy (I’m not kidding about the foul taste), but it always worked for them too.

Our youngest child has a slightly twisty ear canal on one side, and he ended up with about five ear infections in his young life. That kid would have lived in water if he could have, so emptying the ears became mandatory. If an ear did get painful, he learned to come to me immediately for mullein garlic ear oil – he hated getting the oil dropped in his ears, and complained about lying on his side for 15 minutes while it worked its way in, but he only ever had to take antibiotics once for an ear infection, so as a home remedy, it definitely didn’t suck.

Skin irritations

Aroma Borealis, in Whitehorse, Canada makes an Ointment that works brilliantly on minor cuts and scrapes, and it somehow makes mosquito bites stop itching. The ingredients include tea tree oil, which is an antiseptic, and I don’t remember my kids having any major infections when they’d applied “green medicine” to their cuts. (Hint: tea tree oil can be sprayed on the back of kids’ heads and neck when there’s a lice outbreak in school. Lice can’t stand the stuff).

Aloe Vera sap, especially from a well-establish (old) aloe plant, is like magic for cuts, scrapes, rashes, and especially sunburns. The night after a swim party I would inevitably be out in the garden harvesting a couple of spiky fronds. Slicing off the spikes on either side makes slivering the outside skin off much easier, and the open piece of aloe can be rubbed directly onto the burn for overnight healing.

I did a lot of reading about herbal remedies one summer in the Yukon, (hence the Aroma Borealis link above) and learned that yarrow makes an excellent healing balm. I had the occasion to try it one time when my youngest cut himself on some old metal at a minesite. I picked the wild yarrow that was growing there, crushed it into the Aroma Borealis ointment that I had on hand, and packed it on his cut. While I can’t recommend home remedies for that kind of wound, I can say that there was no infection, and he has the faintest white line leftover by which to remember Mom’s bush medicine fix.

Clearly, I’m not a doctor, and none of this should be construed as medical advice. But I’m a parent of two kids who made it through childhood with minimal physical damage, and these remedies gave me a first line of defense against infections and expensive Pediatrician visits. If you have any of your own to share, please add them to the comments – I’d love to know what other families have in their home remedy arsenals.