Magnesium and the Common Cold

Natural Remedies for Children’s Cold Symptoms. Back To School Tips:

While you are sick, keep your toothbrush in 3 percent hydrogen peroxide (that you can get from the drug store), then replace or boil your toothbrush when you recover so you won’t reinfect yourself.

Stop all sugar, dairy, and wheat to decrease mucus and don’t eat heavy foods such as meat and fried foods.

Take plenty of fruit and vegetable juices and chicken broth.

Take Epsom salts baths, 2 cups in hot water, to open pores and supplement with a highly absorbable magnesium such as a magnesium citrate powder that you can mix with hot water and drink like a tea. Magnesium is a natural detoxifier and a great sleep aid.

For winter colds wear lots of clothing layers to encourage sweating, wrap a scarf around your throat, and wear a hat at all times to avoid the possible loss of 40 percent of your body heat.

* Use a vaporizer; mucus can collect at night if the air is too dry.

*Vitamin C: Choose a food-based organic product. Dosage: 1,000 mg every 1-2
hours while awake can cut the duration of a cold or flu by several days.

* Vitamin A: Choose a food-based organic product. 20,000 IU daily, strengthens
mucus membranes.

* Zinc: Choose an angstrom-sized liquid mineral product. Put one tsp in 1 ounce of
water and gargle every two hours to kill viruses in the throat. Spit out after
gargling.

*Garlic: place a small clove or half a clove of garlic in your mouth and let it sit
without chewing through the day and night. Swallow with water when it becomes
macerated.

* Sage tea for cough (steep twenty minutes)

* Fenugreek tea for mucus (steep five minutes)

* Ginger grated and boiled, 2 tablespoons in 3 cups of water, gargle and use as a
poultice by saturating a hand towel and wrapping around the throat, changing
when the poultice becomes cool.

* Use wild oregano oil, garlic, or echinacea herbal antibiotics as tincture, tablets, or
teas at least three times a day.

* Mullein and lobelia are for chest congestion, 1/2 teaspoon each in hot water three times a day. These herbs can also be used as a chest poultice for pleurisy, pneumonia, or bronchitis.

Carolyn Dean, MD, ND is a medical doctor and nutrition expert, author of “”Homeopathic Remedies for Children’s Common Ailments”.