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.
Crush or finely chop a clove and let it sit for ten minutes before it goes into a salad, onto bread or into the finished dish. Raw, or added at the very end — do not cook it along. One to two cloves a day is the amount that appears in the studies.
The substance is called allicin, and it is not present in the whole clove. The clove holds alliin and, kept apart from it, an enzyme. Only when the cells break do the two meet and form allicin — that takes about ten minutes and is the reason for the smell. Allicin acts against bacteria and fungi in the test tube. Heat destroys the enzyme: cooking the whole clove gives the taste and little else. The ten minutes after crushing are the whole trick.
Whether regular garlic prevents colds rests on a single small trial — too little for a claim. What acts on germs in a dish does not automatically do so in the body: allicin breaks down quickly and hardly reaches blood and tissue in that form. Garlic also thins the blood slightly; anyone on blood thinners or facing an operation should discuss the amount. In larger raw amounts it irritates the stomach.
Do not stick it on the skin and do not put it in ear or nose — the reason is given above. With lasting fever, breathlessness or pain on breathing, an infection needs to be seen, not seasoned.
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.