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.
Bruise a teaspoon each of fennel, anise and caraway seed in a mortar, pour a cup of boiling water over them and let them steep covered for ten minutes. Two or three cups a day, warm and in small sips. With cramps, add a hot water bottle on the belly.
All three seeds carry essential oils, and that is where the effect lies: anethole in fennel and anise, carvone in caraway, plus fenchone. They relax the smooth muscle of the gut wall — the very muscle whose cramping makes the pain — and lower the surface tension of the gas bubbles, so that these can merge and pass instead of sitting as foam. Hence they are called carminatives. Bruising them in a mortar is not a custom: whole seeds barely give up their oil, which stays locked in the oil cells.
It works on the feeling and on the cramp, not on the cause. Anyone regularly bloated usually finds the cause on the plate — onions, pulses, sweeteners, fizzy drinks — or in an intolerance. Anise and fennel oil in concentrated form are a different matter from the tea; pure essential oil preparations are not meant for infants.
With weight loss, blood in the stool, night pain that wakes you, vomiting that will not stop, a hard tender belly with fever, and if the rhythm of digestion changes over weeks.
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.