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.
Squeeze half a lemon, boil the water and let it cool to about sixty degrees — it should be warm enough to drink, not steaming. Only then add the juice. If liked, a spoon of honey, likewise at drinking temperature.
The substance is vitamin C, and the order decides how much is left: vitamin C breaks down with heat and oxygen, markedly faster above about sixty degrees. Squeezed into boiling water, part of it is lost. Half a lemon gives roughly fifteen to twenty milligrams — a fifth of the daily recommendation, no more. The larger part of the benefit comes from the warm drink itself: it moistens the throat, and during an infection one drinks more.
Vitamin C does not prevent a cold. In the pooled analyses of many trials, a regular daily intake shortens the course by about half a day — started once the cold is there, it changes nothing. And the acid attacks tooth enamel: rinse with water after drinking and wait half an hour before the toothbrush.
Fever beyond three days, breathlessness, pain on breathing, or an infection that worsens again after improving.
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.