Home remedies · Colds, nose & fever
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
Pour a cup of boiling water over two teaspoons of dried thyme, steep covered for ten minutes, strain. Three or four cups across the day, warm. Add an inhalation: a handful of thyme in a bowl of hot but no longer boiling water, a towel over the head, ten minutes of breathing calmly in through the nose and out through the mouth. Two or three times a day.
Thyme carries thymol and carvacrol, plus flavonoids. Two things matter for the cough: the flavonoids relax the smooth muscle of the bronchi, and the essential oils stimulate the fine hairs that move mucus upward — part of them is breathed out through the lungs and so acts where it is needed. Thymol also inhibits bacteria and fungi, which is well established in the test tube. The inhalation adds moist warmth: it thins tough mucus, and with a stubborn cough that is the larger part of the relief.
Do not inhale over boiling water — steam above boiling water scalds the mucous membrane, and the bowl tips more easily than one thinks. Inhaling over an open bowl is not meant for small children; scalding is the commonest household injury there. Essential oils with menthol or camphor do not belong near infants and toddlers. With asthma, steam can make the cough worse at first.
With breathlessness, with pain on breathing, with blood in the sputum, with high fever beyond three days, with a cough that will not go after three weeks, with a sudden worsening after an initial improvement, and always with existing lung or heart disease.
Have it assessed: fever beyond three days without improvement or rising again, breathlessness, pain on breathing, confusion. In infants under three months any fever is a reason. Also a nosebleed that has not stopped after twenty minutes of correct pressure.