Home remedies · Stomach, gut & nausea
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.
Six level teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt in a litre of boiled water — sipped through the day.
Sugar and salt together pull water through the bowel wall — exactly this mechanism makes the solution work. It is one of the most consequential inventions in medicine.
It does not stop the diarrhoea, it replaces the loss. That is exactly the point.
For infants and small children use the ready-made sachet from the pharmacy — the composition there is exact. Cola and salty sticks are too sweet and too low in salt.
Do not treat yourself: strong, increasing or suddenly starting abdominal pain, a hard belly, blood in the stool or black stool, vomiting blood. With diarrhoea it is fluid loss that counts — dry tongue, little urine, drowsiness. In children and older people this happens faster.