Home remedies · Mouth, teeth, eyes & feet
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 150 ml of boiling water over a teaspoon of sage or chamomile flowers, cover and steep for ten minutes, strain and let it cool to lukewarm. Two to three times a day, move it around the mouth for half a minute and spit it out, do not swallow. One to two weeks, not permanently.
Two groups of substances, two effects. Sage brings tannins: they bind to protein in the lining and lay a denser layer over it — that is the drawing-together effect one feels at once, and it takes the wetness from the irritated spot. Chamomile brings bisabolol and apigenin from its essential oil; both damp down inflammatory processes in the laboratory. So sage suits a weeping, raw gum, chamomile a red, burning one.
It does not replace brushing — a bleeding gum almost always comes from plaque at the gum line, and no rinse removes plaque. Sage contains thujone; drunk as tea over weeks that is a question of amount, spat out as a rinse it is not. In pregnancy sage tea is nevertheless avoided. And chamomile can irritate in people allergic to the daisy family.
A gum that bleeds without cause, that recedes, or a loose tooth. Likewise swelling with fever, an abscess or pressure in the jaw — that belongs in the practice, not in a cup.
To the doctor or dentist: facial swelling with fever, toothache with trouble opening the mouth, a knocked-out tooth — that is an emergency with a short window. For the eye: sudden loss of vision, severe pain, flashes of light. Sore places in the mouth lasting beyond three weeks.