• Melatonin, sublingual (under the tongue) tablets before bed for insomnia and jet lag.
• Ginger capsules or ginger tea for nausea and gas.
• Chewable papaya tablets for indigestion after a big meal.
• Echinacea, astragalus, goldenseal capsules or tincture for cold and flu prevention.
• Zinc lozenges combined with vitamin C and propolis for cold prevention. Zinc has a direct effect in boosting the immune system and may have some antiviral properties as well.
• An herbal throat spray that includes echinacea and goldenseal to prevent a sore throat from taking hold.
• White willow bark capsules or tincture to treat a headache or other types of pain.
• St. John’s wort capsules, tablets, or tincture for stress and anxiety.
• Chromium picolinate tablets (200 mcg) to balance blood sugar.
• Oscillococcinum, a homeopathic remedy, to prevent the flu. Open one tube, pour it into your mouth, and suck on the contents until gone (it contains tiny sugar pellets). Since this is a homeopathic remedy, it is important not to consume caffeine, menthol, or peppermint within 30 minutes of taking it. Take every six hours. If it doesn’t work after three tubes, it’s probably not going to. Oscillococcinum’s action is fast and dramatic when it works.
• Vitamin C in Emergen-C packets. Vitamin C supports the immune system on many levels. At the tissue level, it counteracts histamines, which cause inflammation and congestion, and is needed for tissue repair. At the cellular level, it acts as an antioxidant and is essential to the functioning of the white blood cells that fight disease. Take at least one packet every 2 hours when you feel a cold or flu coming on, for up to 12 hours.
• Elderberry syrup or extract. Sambucol, made by Nature’s Way, is the one with the best clinical support for its antiviral action.
• Yin Chiao is a Chinese remedy that can be very effective in preventing colds and flu. Take at the first sign of a cold or flu.
Vitamin C
If you feel like you’re coming down with a cold, you can take 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C. The esterified C type works best for a sensitive stomach. Along with its antioxidant activity, the vitamin C can lower your histamine level, giving you relief from sinus congestion, watery eyes, sniffling, and sneezing.
Zinc Lozenges
Alternative health professionals have been telling us for at least a decade to suck on zinc and vitamin C lozenges to shorten the duration of a cold, and finally a scientific study has been published in the Annals of Internal Medicine confirming this. Of 100 cold sufferers, half were given lozenges with zinc and half without. The group with zinc got better in an average of four days, while the group without zinc got better in an average of seven days.
If anyone tries to tell you that only one special type of zinc works, you can be assured that this is hogwash. Any type of zinc chelate will work just fine. Look for a zinc lozenge that contains at least 5 mg of zinc, and follow the directions on the container.
Beta-Glucan
Medicinal mushrooms such as shiitake, mai-take, and reishi have long been revered for their immunity-boosting effects. Modern research demonstrates that their most active ingredient is a carbohydrate called beta-glucan, which is also found in oats, barley, and baker’s yeast. Beta-glucan encourages the bacteria- and virus-eating potential of white blood cells, which helps the body knock out cold and flu bugs and secondary infections. An added benefit: beta-glucan has enormously promising anticancer effects. You can add beta-glucan to your diet by taking 250 mg per day of purified beta-glucan or a concentrated medicinal mushroom supplement.
Protecting Your Sinuses and Throat
Rinsing the sinuses with a saline solution is one of the most effective ways to prevent allergies and fend off a cold or flu.
Many colds and flus begin with an infection in the sinuses, which then drips down the back of the throat, infects the throat, and then moves on to the lungs. Allergic irritation and inflammation can contribute. Rinsing your sinuses with a mixture of warm water, salt, and baking soda once or twice daily will reduce congestion, rinse mucus and allergens away, and open up sinuses and nasal passages. Combine 1 cup of body-temperature warm water, ¼ to ½ teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of baking soda. You can use a neti pot, or nasal irrigator, which can be found at most health food stores and even drugstores. These look like little ceramic or plastic pitchers with a long spout that fits snugly into one nostril. Or use a rubber ear syringe, a shallow cup, or the palm of your hand.
Do this over a sink. Tip your head to one side (not back), insert the syringe into the top nostril, and gently squeeze or pour the water in, allowing it to drain out of the other nostril. If you have mucus in the throat, you can plug the lower nostril so that the solution drains into the throat, but try not to swallow it. If you’re doing this with your palm, you have to gently sniff the water up the nostril—this takes a bit more finesse.
If you have a sore throat, go after the bacteria on the throat by gargling with salt water, a strong mouthwash, or an herbal spray that contains goldenseal and propolis.
Special Treatments for Viruses
Although your best defense against a virus is a strong immune system, some natural supplements will greatly aid your body in fending off viruses.
Selenium
Selenium is a trace mineral that we need only in microgram amounts, but a deficiency can make us much more susceptible to the flu. There is new evidence that taking larger doses of selenium can make a major difference in helping the body fight off a virus. A normal daily dose of selenium is 50 to 200 mcg, but if you’re fighting a cold or flu, you can take up to 800 mcg daily for three days. Selenium also works well to help fight off the herpes virus, in the same dosages.
Elderberry
European black elderberries (Sambucus nigra L.) have been used as a folk remedy for flu, colds, and coughs for at least 2,500 years. Even Hippocrates mentioned it in his writings. If you’re from the American Midwest, chances are your grandparents made elderberry wine and sipped it on winter evenings as a tonic.
From 22 pounds of elderberries that had sat for some time in her supervisor’s freezer, an Israeli flu researcher, Madeleine Mumcuoglu, isolated proteins that deactivated a flu virus in the laboratory. The mechanism, she theorized, had to do with the way flu viruses find their way into living cells where they can replicate. (Viruses can’t replicate on their own.) They puncture cell walls with tiny spikes called hemagglutinin and can then slip in and alter the cells’ DNA.
After watching viruses and elderberry in the laboratory, Mumcuoglu found that the active ingredients in elderberry actually disarmed the spikes by binding to them and preventing them from piercing the cell membrane. The viral spikes are covered with an enzyme called neuraminidase, which acts to break down the cell wall. Research suggests that bioflavonoids, present in high concentration in elderberries, may inhibit the action of this enzyme.
Nearly a decade later, Mumcuoglu and her colleagues performed a double-blind study with a group of people suffering from the flu. Half the group were given an elderberry extract, and half were given a placebo. Within 24 hours, flu symptoms of fever, cough, and muscle pain in the elderberry group had dramatically improved in 20 percent of the patients. By day two, another 75 percent had clearly improved, and by day three, more than 90 percent of the group was better. In contrast, among those taking the placebo, only 8 percent showed any improvement after 24 hours, and the remaining 92 percent took about six days to improve. Nobody in the elderberry group complained of any side effects.
The elderberry group also had a higher level of antibodies to the flu, indicating an enhanced immune system response. If a pharmaceutical drug or the flu shot had anywhere near this type of response, everyone would have some in their medicine cabinet!
A study performed in Norway and published in 2004 enrolled 60 flu sufferers who had been sick for 48 hours or less. They were given either 15 milliliters of elderberry syrup or a placebo four time
s daily for five days. Symptom questionnaires revealed that elderberry syrup shaved an average of four days off of influenza A and B infections when compared to the placebo.
Other studies show great promise in combating other viruses with elderberry extract, including HIV, herpes, and Epstein-Barr.
If you take elderberry syrup or extract at the first sign of a cold or flu, chances are excellent that it will work. And if you live in an area where elderberries grow, you may want to consider reviving the tradition of sipping elderberry wine on chilly winter evenings! You can find elderberry remedies at most health food stores. Follow the directions on the label.
20 Ways to Supercharge Your Immune System and Prevent Colds and Flus
1. Stretching helps your lymphatic system do its job of removing toxins from your body. Be sure to stretch your neck muscles and your torso, and to stretch your arms over your head.
2. Get an extra hour of sleep, or go to bed early with a cup of chamomile tea and an uplifting book.
3. Zinc lozenges are powerful weapons in the fight against winter colds. Try the varieties with propolis and vitamin C added.
4. The homeopathic remedy Oscillococcinum will quickly knock out many kinds of flu. The only way to find out if it will work for what you’ve got is to try it.
5. Reduce the stress in your life through meditation and exercise. Chronic stress depletes your adrenals, which play a vital role in immunity.
6. Stock up on the vitamin C and bioflavonoids. If you feel something coming on, take 1,000 mg of vitamin C and a bioflavonoid such as grapeseed, green tea extract, or quercetin every hour.
7. Drink plenty of clean water, which will help your body keep itself detoxified.
8. Eat plenty of fiber to keep things moving through the digestive system.
9. Eat yogurt once a day for the calcium and beneficial intestinal flora. The friendly bacteria in your intestines are your best weapon against unfriendly bacteria.
10. Skip the candy and soda pop. Try a piece of fruit or some nuts instead.
11. Keep alcohol consumption low. A glass of wine with dinner is fine. More than that and your liver may be diverted from protecting you from illness.
12. Eat your vegetables—fresh and preferably organic.
13. Are you allergic to dairy products? Wheat? Corn? Chronic food allergies can weaken your immune system.
14. Eat more complex carbohydrates and less refined white flour, which causes blood sugar jumps and constipation.
15. Try shiitake or reishi mushrooms with your veggies—the Chinese use them to bolster the immune system.
16. Take one of the cold prevention remedies mentioned in this section preventively when you’re under extra stress.
17. If you have a late night or stressful day, balance things out by getting extra rest.
18. If you’re going to be traveling on a plane, take plenty of vitamin C and other cold and flu preventives for a few days ahead of time.
19. Seek out the company of loved ones or volunteer for someone less fortunate than you.
20. Exercise keeps everything in the body shipshape, but if you feel weak or tired, don’t push it too hard.
Chapter 13
Drugs for Pain Relief and Their Natural Alternatives
Americans love to take pills for pain. We gobble up billions of dollars’ worth of pain-reliever pills each year. The large drug companies that sell over-the-counter pain-relieving drugs such as acetaminophen (Tylenol), ibuprofen, and aspirin are always fighting for a share of that huge market. We buy right into their advertising and marketing, believing that the only way to deal with pain is to make it go away with a pill. After all, who doesn’t want their pain relieved? And the sooner the better.
The urge to simply suppress pain without addressing the underlying cause can be harmful in the long run. Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong. It is a warning signal that has been called the guardian of health, and the sooner you act to heal the source of your pain, the better off you’ll be.
If you suffer from some type of chronic pain, you are not alone. Just in the United States, over 100 million people suffer from chronic pain. About 37 million of those suffer from arthritis, 30 million from headaches, and 15 million from the pain caused by cancer. Another 32 million suffer from other types of chronic pain such as back pain, osteoporosis, and nerve pain.
Prescription painkiller abuse is a growing epidemic in the United States. Its consequences can ruin lives and families, and it causes thousands of deaths a year. It’s caused primarily by doctors who don’t carefully monitor their patients who are on pain drugs, by parents who carelessly make their pain medications accessible to teens, and through thefts of drugs from pharmacies, which are then sold on the street.
On the other hand, nobody should ever suffer unnecessarily from pain out of fear of becoming addicted to a pain drug. If you have acute or temporary severe pain caused by recovery from surgery or a broken bone, for example, it’s important to take advantage of the relief that painkilling drugs can give you. That’s what they should be used for. The key is to gradually reduce the drug dosage as the pain starts to go away and to stop taking the drugs when they are no longer needed. This may sound obvious, but it may not be when you’re taking them. Painkillers are most likely to become addictive when their use isn’t closely monitored.
Managing and preventing pain effectively involves much more than just taking a pill to make it go away. It’s important to treat the underlying cause of the pain as well. Acute or short-term pain and chronic or long-term pain need to be treated differently. Short-term pain can often be helped by treating both cause and symptom at once, such as ice and some aspirin for a pulled muscle. But chronic pain requires a whole other set of solutions, which will be covered in more depth at the end of the chapter.
In the United States, the terminally ill actually tend to be undertreated for pain. If you have severe, intractable, untreatable pain, you should never avoid pain-relief medication out of a sense of guilt or shame, or concern that you will become dependent on it.
If you have chronic pain caused by a disease such as arthritis or fibromyalgia, the waters become a little bit muddier in terms of deciding when and how to take pain medication. Most painkilling drugs don’t work for very long or very well for these types of pain. The most important part of managing chronic pain is preventing and eliminating the source of the pain. You’ll find solutions that generally work much better than pain-suppressing drugs at the end of this chapter. Please read the chapter on addictive drugs (Chapter 2) if you are dealing with severe pain or think you may be hooked on painkilling drugs.
If you are suffering from severe pain that requires prescription medication, be aware that prescription drugs for pain have the potential to be abused and to cause you harm and even death. All pain medications, without exception, have serious side effects, which become more dangerous as we age. And yet, according to the American Pain Foundation, half of seniors surveyed reported that their doctors didn’t tell them about possible harmful interactions between pain drugs and other medications they were taking. Four in 10 seniors reported that their doctors didn’t discuss the potential side effects of the pain drugs they prescribed or recommended. We can’t repeat this too much: staying safe when you’re taking prescription drugs is ultimately up to you. Please take responsibility for your well-being, and if you have a loved one who must take these drugs and can’t take care of themselves, please monitor them carefully.
Over-the-Counter Painkillers
Because the over-the-counter painkillers such as aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen are so common and we can buy them without a prescription, we tend to think they’re harmless and that we can take them every day. But they actually have side effects that can range from uncomfortable to deadly. The most commonly reported side effect is gastrointestinal bleeding caused by aspirin and ibuprofen-type drugs, also called NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs).
Use Caution with N
SAIDs
NSAIDs work to decrease inflammation and pain by blocking the production of hormonelike chemicals called prostaglandins. Prostaglandins have other important roles in the body, including the regulation of kidney function. The kidneys maintain fluid and electrolyte (minerals such as sodium and potassium) balance, filtering out excess water and electrolytes and sending them to the bladder to be eliminated in the urine, or retaining them when supplies are low.
NSAIDs (including the new prescription COX-2 inhibitors) can cause the kidneys to hold on to more sodium, potassium, and fluid than they should. What this can translate to is weight gain, swelling of the legs and arms, increased blood pressure, and even heart failure. In heart failure, the heart can no longer pump efficiently, as fluid levels in the body rise and excess fluid passes into the lungs. In a few people who use NSAIDs, the rise in potassium levels has caused irregular and possibly dangerous heart rhythms (arrhythmias).
According to the American Gastroenterological Association, NSAID overuse is one of the leading causes of stomach problems such as bleeding ulcers, and their use leads to more than 100,000 hospitalizations and 16,000 deaths each year in the United States. You may not even know it’s coming: four out of five people have no warning signs. When you combine aspirin or ibuprofen-type painkillers with alcohol, you are four times as likely to develop gastrointestinal bleeding.
A study from the University of Massachusetts looked at markers of kidney function in 4,099 patients over the age of 70 and found that the blood tests of regular NSAID users showed early warning signs of kidney failure. Another study found that regular elderly NSAID users have twice the risk of being hospitalized for congestive heart failure (CHF), where the weakened heart muscle loses its ability to pump blood efficiently. There’s no evidence to show that the newer “super aspirins”—the COX-2 inhibitors—are less harmful to the heart or kidneys than the older NSAIDs.
Prescription Alternatives Page 30