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.
Pour hot water over a teaspoon of dried leaves, cover and steep for ten minutes, drink after eating.
Menthol relaxes the muscle of the gut. For peppermint oil in enteric-coated capsules this is even well studied in irritable bowel.
The tea is far weaker than the capsule — it soothes, it does not treat.
Not with heartburn and reflux: menthol also relaxes the valve between gullet and stomach and makes the burning worse. Not on an infant’s face or chest.
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.