Home remedies · Cycle & women’s health
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.
Spread fridge-cold low-fat quark a finger thick on a cotton cloth, fold in the edges and lay it on with the fabric side down. Leave for twenty to thirty minutes — or until the quark turns dry and crumbly. Once or twice a day, on the days it feels tight.
The working part is evaporation. Quark is more than eighty per cent water; as it evaporates it draws warmth from the skin, and does so evenly over half an hour — unlike a cold pack, which chills hard and fades fast. Cold narrows the vessels, dampens the feeling of tightness and travels along the same nerve fibres as the pain. No compound of its own in the quark is needed for this, nor is one established.
Not on broken or irritated skin. Anyone who tolerates cold poorly puts a second cloth in between. The compress takes the tightness away for hours — it changes nothing about the cause, and tightness that is there all the time regardless of the cycle is something else.
With a lump that stays, with a dimple or redness of the skin, with discharge from the nipple, with one-sided pain in the same spot over weeks, and with fever alongside a red, overwarm area.
Have it assessed: bleeding outside the cycle or after the menopause, strong one-sided lower abdominal pain, fever with discharge, any new lump in the breast. In pregnancy almost anything is a reason to call. With mastitis and fever, do not wait longer than a day.